Facebook announces $100M grant program for small businesses

Regardless of how the COVID-19 pandemic plays out in the coming weeks and months, it has already been brutal for small businesses, with some forced to close for public safety, while others are taking a big hit in both revenue and access to credit.

So Facebook announced today that it’s creating a $100 million grant program for small businesses. Applications aren’t open yet, but the company says this will include both ad credits and cash grants that can be spent on operational costs like paying workers and paying rent. It will be available to up to 30,000 businesses in the 30-plus countries where Facebook operates.

Facebook has also created a Business Hub with tips and resources for businesses trying to survive during the outbreak.

“We want to do more,” said COO Sheryl Sandberg in a Facebook post. “Teams across our company are working every day to help businesses. We’re looking at additional ways to host virtual trainings – and will have more to share in the coming weeks – and we’re finding more ways to help people connect and learn to use technology through Blueprint, our free e-learning training program.”

In addition, the company announced today that it’s partnering with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Local Media Association to offer a total of $1 million in grants for U.S. and Canadian newsrooms that need more resources to properly cover the pandemic. These individual grants will be for up to $5,000.

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Facebook, Reddit, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube issue joint statement on misinformation

Ian unprecedented move to reassure customers and flag the potential for misinformation about COVID-19 on their platforms, all of the major social media companies and their parent corporations issued a joint statement on their efforts.

“We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe,” the statement read.

Facebook Newsroom

✔@fbnewsroom

Joint Industry Statement from @Facebook, @google, @LinkedIn, @Microsoft, @reddit, @Twitter and @YouTube https://about.fb.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus/#joint-statement …

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Last week, U.S Chief Technology Officer Michael Michael Kratsios held a remote meeting with representatives from major tech companies on how to coordinate various efforts related to COVID-19, including fighting disnformation. The Washington Post and Politico reported that the White House asked Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Cisco and Twitter for help.

The World Health Organization’s director-general said last month that disinformation is as dangerous as COVID-19. During an address at the Munich Security conference on Feb. 15, almost a month before the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.”

But tech companies aren’t just battling the spread of questionable posts by the public. They also have to contend with misleading information in several of President Donald Trump’s public statements on COVID-19, including his tweets and Facebook posts.

TechCrunch has contacted each of the companies in the joint statement for more details, and will update this post as we hear back from them.

In response to an email, a LinkedIn  spokesperson directed TechCrunch to a post published by the company on March 13, with links to information about finding trustworthy news sources and working remotely.

Facebook’s efforts to fight disinformation about COVID-19 have included information cards on Instagram and Facebook, that redirect to sources like the World Health Organization or local health authorities.

Source: Techcrunch

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Facebook announces Horizon, a VR massive-multiplayer world

Facebook  today announced it’s building its own Ready Player One Oasis. Facebook Horizon is a virtual reality sandbox universe where you can build your own environments and games, play and socialize with friends or just explore the user-generated landscapes. This is Facebook’s take on Second Life.

Launching in early 2020 in closed beta, Facebook Horizon will allow users to design their own diverse avatars and hop between virtual locales through portals called Telepods, watch movies and consume other media with friends and play multiplayer games together, like Wing Strikers. It also will include human guides, known as Horizon Locals, who can give users assistance and protect their safety in the VR world so trolls can’t run rampant.

Users interested in early access can apply for the beta here.

As part of the launch, Facebook will on October 25 shut down its existing social VR experiences Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms, leaving a bit of a gap until Horizon launches. Oculus  Rooms debuted in 2016 as your decoratable private VR apartment, while Spaces first launched in 2017 to let users chat, watch movies and take VR selfies with friends. But both felt more like lobby waiting rooms with a few social features that were merely meant as a preamble to full-fledged VR games. In contrast, Horizon is designed to be a destination, not a novelty, where users could spend tons of time.

How Facebook Horizon works

At first glance, Horizon seems like a modernized Second Life,  a first-person Sims, a fulfillment of the intentions of AltspaceVR and a competitor to PlayStation’s PSVR Dreams and cross-platfrom kids’ favorite Roblox. Back in 2016, Facebook was giving every new Oculus employee a copy of the Ready Player One novel. It seems they’ve been busy building that world since then.

Facebook Horizon will start centralized around a town square. Before people step in, they can choose how they look and what they wear from an expansive and inclusive set of avatar tools. From inside VR, users will be able to use the Horizon World Builder to create gaming arenas, vacation chillspots and activities to fill them without the need to know how to code.

Facebook Horizon lets you build objects from scratch

You could design a tropical island, then invite friends to hang out with you on your virtual private beach. An object creator akin to the Oculus Medium sculpting feature lets you make anything, even a custom t-shirt your avatar could wear. Visual scripting tools let more serious developers create interactive and reactive experiences.

Facebook details its Horizon safety features on its “Citizenship” page that explains that “As citizens of Facebook Horizon, it is all of our responsibility to create a culture that’s respectful and comfortable . . . A Horizon citizen is friendly, inclusive, and curious.” Horizon Locals will wander the VR landscapes to answer questions or aid users if they’re having technical or safety issues. They seem poised to be part customer support, part in-world police.

Facebook Horizon will include human Locals who provide safety and technical support

If things get overwhelming, you can tap a shield button to pause and dip into a private space parallel to Horizon. Users can define their personal space boundaries so no one can get in their face or appear to touch them. And traditional tools like muting, blocking and reporting will all be available. It’s smart that Facebook outlined the community tone and defined these protections.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg  announced Horizon today at the Oculus Connect 6 conference in San Jose. He discussed how “Horizon is going to have this property where it just expands and gets better” as Facebook and the community build more experiences for the VR sandbox.

Facebook lets you build your own islands and other locales in Horizon

Horizon makes perfect sense for a business obsessed with facilitating social interaction while monetized through ad views based on time-spent. It’s easy to imagine Horizon including virtual billboards for brands, Facebook-run shops for buying toys or home furnishings, third-party malls full of branded Nikes or Supreme shirts that score Zuckerberg a revenue cut or subscriptions to access certain gaming worlds or premium planets to explore.

As Facebook starts to grow stale after 15 years on the market, users are looking for new ways to socialize. Many have already ditched the status updates and smarmy Life Events of Facebook for the pretty pictures of Instagram and silliness of Snapchat. Facebook risked being cast aside if it didn’t build its own VR successor. And by offering a world where users can escape their real lives instead of having to enviously compare them to their friends, Horizon could appeal to those bored or claustrophobic on Facebook

source: techcrunch

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Facebook Becomes A Local Party Discovery Tool With “Events For You” Redesign

Just because you weren’t invited, doesn’t mean Facebook can’t help you crash the party. Facebook Events on the web got a slick visual overhaul today that includes a new “Events For You” tab that recommends gatherings it thinks you’ll enjoy, even if no one invited you, friends aren’t going, and you’ve never been to the venue. Rather than just being a calendar of your invites and a few suggestions based on what friends are doing, Facebook is now applying everything it knows about you to get you out of the house and somewhere fun…where you can take photos and post them to Facebook.

After we spotted the unannounced redesign today, Facebook confirmed to me it’s testing it with some users globally before a mid-paced rollout to everyone in the coming weeks. A similar design for Events will be coming to Android and iOS later this year too. You can see how it looks on web above.

The main Events feed now has a much cleaner, more condensed, iOS7-ish feel to it. A tabbed interface lets you quickly jump back and forth between All your events, Invites, events you’ve “Saved” but not RSVP’d to, and ones you’re “Hosting”. A shortcut on the right lets you hop immediately into past events or the creation flow. The design makes it much easier to manage invites because they get a dedicated space, instead of being meshed in with ones you’ve already accepted or declined.

But what’s really important here is Facebook’s concentration on Event discovery. The new “Events For Your” section on the right sidebar that can be opened into a list has more suggestions based on a lot more data. A Facebook spokesperson tells me “The recommendations you see are based on the information you have shared with Facebook (i.e., Pages you like, groups and communities you’re a part of, events that friends are attending), and other relevant contextual information such as day of the week and location.”


Essentially, Facebook can look at an Event, assess what it’s about and who is already going, and use that demographic and interest data to match it to more potential attendees. This is much more powerful than when Facebook dipped its toes into recommendations back in 2011. Facebook Events will now compete with a host of Event discovery apps ranging from catch-all services like YPlan, Applauze, Fever, and Eventful to focused ones like WillCall, Seatwave, and StubHub’s Showdrift for music and Sosh for cultural events. Bafflingly, Eventbrite still does a mediocre job of event recommendations despite having such a strong database of local happenings.

Facebook’s push into event discovery could be big for a few reasons. First, I think this looks rich enough to become its own standalone app. Some people aren’t avid News Feed readers and do their messaging elsewhere, but they have to use Facebook because of Events. Otherwise, their meatspace social life could suffer.

WillCall and Applauze take a highly stylized approach to Event discovery, compared to Facebook’s utilitarian approach

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me in an on-stage interview last year that certain Facebook features buried in its interface like Groups would benefit from having their own standalone apps, and I think this applies to Events as well. He said “…if you have something like Groups, it’s always going to be kind of second-class in the main Facebook app, or even messaging for that matter. In order to make these things really be able to reach their full potential, I do think over time we’re going to have to create more specific experiences.” An Events app that helped you find fun things to do around you as well as manage your invites could be a killer tool you can’t get elsewhere.
There’s also a ton of monetization potential in event discovery. Concert halls, conferences, clubs, and bars might very well be willing to pay to get their events injected into Facebook’s suggestions.
While it might seem counter-intuitive, getting people off the computer and out on the town is productive for Facebook. Events are where you meet friends that strengthen Facebook’s social graph, and take photos to share back, and interact with Businesses you could Like. If Facebook can be the portal to fun IRL experiences, it will win a place in your heart.
And finally, Events help Facebook achieve its mission to connect people, and fights the perception that it actually isolates us. The Events feature has quietly become one of the social network’s most critical over the years. Seems Facebook is finally ready to celebrate it.






Source: TechCrunch

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“Facebook Reader” Is Real, But It’s Not RSS Or A Google Reader Wannabe

Facebook is working on a fresh way to read news, a source tells TechCrunch. It’s not based on RSS, and Facebook isn’t rushing the launch of a product that could compete with Flipboard. That’s because news reading is a high-stakes, long-term project that could get us to invest even more time in the social network.
Since our source brought us that info last week, the WSJ ran a story saying that Facebook is working on a product, code-named Reader, but had few details about how the product worked. It compared Reader to Flipboard because it supposedly aggregates news and presents it in a tablet- and smartphone-friendly format.
The report matches up with a post we published a little over a week ago, when we predicted that Facebook would soon be launching a reader product. We were wrong about the launch date, but can now confirm Facebook has indeed been working on a news-reading interface.
Facebook refused to comment on any of this, but we have been digging around and here’s what we’ve found so far.
This Is Not A Google Reader Competitor
Our source tells us Facebook’s product will not be based on RSS and follow in the footsteps of Digg, Feedly, NewsBlur, Zite and most recently AOL among the many trying to fill the hole that will be left with Google Reader’s imminent demise.
In fact, RSS is “too niche” an area for Facebook to bother with, the source says. The RSS code that appeared in Facebook’s API? It was just a prototype and not related to any specific product apparently. It has now been pulled.
While a vocal minority of hardcore Internet users will mourn the soon-death of Google Reader, much of Facebook’s user base has probably never used RSS. It’s not a particularly convenient standard to jump into, and most Facebook users would have to put in significant work finding and subscribing to RSS feeds before they get any value out of it. That’s too high of a barrier for Facebook’s mainstream user base.
The social network has said it aims to apply its resources towards products that can benefit large swaths of its user base. That is why Facebook didn’t build a phone by itself. It leaves building for niche audiences up to its platform partners.
We have confirmed that “Reader” is being led by Mike Matas, as WSJ reported. Matas is known as a user interface design visionary, as well as a great photographer. This lends weight to the idea that Facebook Reader is big on visuals and images, rather than text and RSS.
You may recall that Matas joined Facebook in August 2011, when Facebook acquired Push Pop Press, a startup he co-founded. Push Pop Press helped authors and publishers convert physical books into iPad- and iPhone-friendly formats. That expertise and focus on other forms of text beyond news could come in handy for this new product. And as the WSJ hints, long-form content could be part of this “Reader,” too — sitting alongside more immediate and classic “news” and news shared by friends.
This Has Been In The Works For A While
Specifically, our source says Reader has been in development for a long time and is “not a competitive response” to those different Google Reader-style offerings, nor to Flipboard.
This backs up our theory that Reader may be what we saw Facebook employees testing in December – a standalone iOS app or interface within Facebook for iOS that lets users browse news via full-screen or near-full screen photos.
There’s a chance this whole “Facebook Reader” thing is actually just Facebook’s next evolution of the mobile news feed, as Josh reported in December. If Facebook were to completely overhaul the look of the mobile news feed in its main Facebook for iOS and Android apps, that would be a product worthy of years of work and design revisions.
Right now if you look at the feed on mobile, you see a ton of dead space. Empty white screen and product chrome. While Facebook Home hasn’t gotten much adoption because its app launcher is sub-par, Cover Feed does a great job of making the news feed more immersive by replacing the dead space with full-screen photos. Cover feed is a very stripped-down version of the feed, though. A more fleshed out mobile news feed with Cover Feed’s full-screen images could work well.

We Devote Time To News

As Facebook matures, and services like Tumblr and Twitter continue to grow, it needs to find ways to get users to continue visiting the site. Launching new features is just a normal part of the life of any service, but as an advertising-supported platform, it’s even more imperative for Facebook to continue to look for ways to make sure users spend more and more time with it.
On mobile, the need is in some ways even greater: that is where most of their user growth is happening today, but it’s also a format that lends itself to less browsing in general. Adding video to Instagram is also another move to make Facebook properties more engaging. We wouldn’t be surprised if whatever the codeanmed “Reader” is doing is also a “Viewer” and “Listener.”
Whatever it is, we were told that it’s still too early to say exactly what this product will contain in the end. If Facebook launches a better way to read news and it’s a success, it could turn the social network from a collection of stories about your friends into a streamlined way to consume the entire web.

[Featured image of Mark Zuckerberg by Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP, remixed by Wired, via Tsevis]

Source: TechCrunch

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Hands-On With Instagram’s New Video Feature

We’ve just made our way out of Facebook’s Headquarters in Menlo Park, where Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom took the stage to debut the app’s new (and not un-Vinelike) video functionality.

Kevin Systrom suggested on stage that they’ve been thinking about how to do video since day one — and if that’s the case, it shows. The new video functionality slips right into Instagram’s UI as if it were meant to be there.
As you scroll through your feed, videos are highlighted with a small play icon in the upper righthand corner. You can stop scrolling and hover over an item for 2 seconds and it’ll auto play, or you can tap it to begin playing it immediately. Even on the cellular connection I’m on right now, videos seem to start playing quickly, without a noticeable amount of time for buffering.
If you’re accustomed to Vine, the process of recording a video on Instagram is very, very similar: put your thumb down (in Instagram’s case, on a record button) to record, lift it to stop. Each time you do this, you create a new “segment” to your video, each of which can be deleted independently in the not-unlikely event that you mess up your video halfway through creating it.
Though clearly quite similar in concept, Instagram and Vine aren’t without their differences: Instagram’s max video length is over twice as long, at 15 seconds as opposed to Vine’s 6. The videos on Instagram don’t loop, which is interesting; while looping is something that may be a bit signature to Vine, I feel like it’s a bit limiting to not at least give the user the option. Oh, and of course, you’ve access to Instagram’s signature feature: filters.
Like with photos, filters must be applied after you shoot a video — you can’t see how a filter would look in a certain environment before filming. Once you’ve got your video shot, though, filters are applied in realtime on top of the video as your preview plays back.
One big catch: while you’ve always been able to import photos from your phone’s camera roll into Instagram, you can’t do that with videos — at least not in this first version. If you want a video in Instagram, you have to shoot it in Instagram. Kevin tells me that this is largely an interface challenge (how do you make it just as simple to edit an imported video?), but issomething that they’re considering changing in future releases.
So, what do you think: will you use this? If you’re a Vine user, would you switch away?

Source: TechCrunch

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Facebook’s Head Of Brand Design Paul Adams Joins Customer Outreach Startup Intercom

Paul Adams, who was previously Facebook’s global head of brand design, has joined a startup calledIntercom, where he will be serving as head of product design.

Adams told me earlier that he wasn’t looking to leave Facebook, but he had also been advising Intercom and became excited about the opportunity. The startup, which is backed by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, 500 Startups and others, offers tools for online businesses to track every interaction with a customer and to use that data to deliver personalized messages and offers.

When I suggested that this sounds like a shift from Adams’ previous work in advertising, he didn’t entirely disagree, but he also said Intercom’s work ties into the themes he’s been exploring at Facebook, which have also been expressed in his talks and his book Grouped. (In addition, Adams isknown for his work at Google, particularly a presentation that seemed to outline many of the ideas that eventually shaped Google+.)

Adams argues that in the future, businesses’ interactions with potential customers are going to be much more personal and relationship-based, rather than following the one-to-many broadcast model of traditional advertising. Intercom facilitates those company-to-customer interactions, and he added that it’s not just a way to deliver slightly-more-targeted marketing emails.

“In the past … companies tried to minimize customer interaction,” Adams said. “They didn’t want customers to talk back to them — that was overhead. Minimizing customer interaction is a very outdated model from a pre-social web world. Intercom is very much about intimacy, very much about being personable.”

Adams will be working out of Intercom’s Dublin office — he said he had already made the move from Silicon Valley to Dublin for personal reasons.

Source: TechCrunch

Report by: ANTHONY HA

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