Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at F8 2016 Day 1 Keynote (Full Transcript)

And this idea of connecting the world has gotten stronger over the last century. You can now travel almost anywhere in the world in less than a day. Countries trade more openly and cooperate more easily than ever. And the Internet has enabled all of us to access and share more ideas and information than ever before. We’ve gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we are all better off for it.

But now, as I look around and as I travel around the world, I’m starting to see people and nations turning inward — against this idea of a connected world and a global community. I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as “others.” For blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, reducing trade, and in some cases around the world, even cutting access to the Internet.

It takes courage to choose hope over fear — to say that we can build something and make it better than it has ever been before. You have to be optimistic to think that you can change the world. And people will always call you naïve, but it’s this hope, and this optimism that is behind every important step forward.

Our lives are connected. And whether we’re welcoming a refugee fleeing war or an immigrant seeking new opportunity, whether we’re coming together to fight global disease like Ebola or to address climate change, I hope that we have the courage to see that the path forward is to bring people together, not push people apart — to connect more, not less.

We are one global community: The mother in India who wants to work so her family can have a better life, the father in the US who wants a cleaner planet for his children, the daughter in Sierra Leone who just needs basic healthcare and education so she can stay safe and reach her full potential, and that young boy in Syria who is doing the best he can with the cards he’s been dealt to find a good path forward in the world.

And we, sitting here today, are part of this community too. And if the world starts to turn inwards, then our community will just have to work even harder to bring people together. And that’s why I think the work that we are all doing is so important. Because we can actually give more people a voice. Instead of building walls, we can help people build bridges. And instead of dividing people, we can help bring people together.

We do it one connection at a time, one innovation at a time, day after day after day. And that’s why I think the work that we’re all doing together is more important now than it’s ever been before.

Welcome to F8!

So that’s why our 10-year roadmap is focused on building the technology to give everyone in the world the power to share anything they want with anyone. That’s our goal.

Now let’s look at the word everyone for a moment. Most people in the world, more than 4 billion people, are not even on the internet today, and we need to change this. Because beyond communication, we know that for 10 people who get online, about one person gets left out of poverty because they get access to tools for education, and finding jobs. So in our 10-year roadmap, we’re focused on all the things that we need to do to help more people get online for making data cheaper to building completely new technologies like drones and satellites and laser communication systems.

Now let’s look at the word anything. We all have a desire to be understood and to relate to each other. So we are always looking for better and richer ways to express ourselves and share with one another.

When I was a baby and I took my first steps, my parents wrote the date in a baby books that they can share it with their friends and family. When my nephews took their first steps, my sister took photos and videos on their phone, so she could send them to us. And when my daughter Max takes her first steps hopefully later this year, I want to capture the whole scene, right, with a 360 video. So I can send it to my family and my friends and they can go into VR and feel like they’re actually right there in the living room with us. We’re always trying to get closer to this purest form of capturing an idea or an experience.

And then there is the third part – with anyone. Sometimes we just want to talk to one friend. Sometimes we want to hang out with few friends. Sometimes we have something that we want to share with all our friends or with all our co-workers, or with an entire community, like marathon runners or Golden State Warriors fans. And sometimes we want to share something with the whole world. So that’s why we are developing a whole family of apps to create a world class experience for all of the different groups of people that you want to share with.

So this is the goal: give everyone the power to share anything they want with anyone. And here’s our 10-year roadmap to get there.

Now we have a playbook for building these services. First, we build a new technology that can help people share and connect in some new ways. Then we take that technology and we build it into a product that we think a billion or more people could use and benefit from. And then finally, once the product is at scale, we build a full ecosystem around that product — of developers and businesses and partners.

So our roadmap for the next 10 years has three horizons. We have a community and ecosystem today that we need to grow to reach many times its current scale to reach its full potential. We have several products that are already at scale with lots of people using them, that we now need to build into full ecosystems with developers and businesses. And we have new technologies that we need to develop so they can be large scale products in their own right.

So let’s start by talking about mobile building around our most developed ecosystem – the Facebook App and Platform. Now we launched Platform almost a decade ago and since then hundreds of thousands of developers like all of you have built millions of apps to connect more than a billion people. And our developer community building apps keeps growing and in the last year, it has grown 40%, with now more than 70% of developers on apps outside of the US. Our second largest community is in India, and Africa is growing incredibly quickly in our developer community.

So today you’re going to hear about all of the new tools that we are announcing that will help you build, grow and monetize your apps. And we’re also going to talk about a lot of new infrastructure that we are open sourcing from our data centers and all the tools that we’ve built around that, to our mobile frameworks like React Native and tools like [HHB]. So the Facebook platform keeps getting stronger. And of all the things we’re going to talk about today, you can have a bigger impact building with these tools the next few years than the other things that are not yet at scale.

So now let’s talk about the next five years and how we’re going to build the ecosystems around our products that are already starting to be used by lots of people. Now one of the platforms that I am most excited about is Messenger. Last year, Messenger was the fastest growing app in the US, ahead of even Facebook, which was second. Messenger just passed 900 million monthly actives and now between Messenger and WhatsApp, people are sending about 60 billion messages a day. So to put them in perspective, at its peak global SMS volume was right around 20 billion messages a day. So we’re processing about 3 times as messages as SMS everyday and these services are still growing incredibly quickly.

So now that Messenger is at scale, we are starting to develop ecosystems around it. And the first thing we’re doing is exploring how you can all communicate with businesses. Now you probably interact with dozens of businesses everyday and some of them are probably really meaningful to you. But I have never met anyone who likes calling a business. And no one wants to have to install a new app for every service or business that they want to interact with. So we think that there’s got to be a better way to do this.

We think that you should just be able to message a business in the same way you would message a friend. You should get a quick response and it shouldn’t take your full attention like a phone call would and you shouldn’t have to install a new app. So today we are launching Messenger Platform, so you can build Bots for Messenger. And it’s a simple platform that is powered by Artificial Intelligence, so you can build natural language services to communicate directly with people.

So let’s take a look. So CNN, for example, is going to be able to send you a daily digestive stories right into Messenger. And the more you use it, the more personalized it will get, and if you want to learn about a specific topic, like say the Supreme Court nomination or the Zika virus, you just send a message and it will send you that information.

Or take 1800Flowers, I love this one. Now if you want to send a message, flower, you don’t have to install a new app, or into your credit card again, you just send a message. And I bet that’s not where you thought those flowers are going to. I know someone who is sitting here today who also thought that those were not who those flowers were going to. Now I have to say – I love this one. I found it pretty ironic because now to order from 1800Flowers, you never have to call 1800Flowers again.

So Messenger is going to be the next big platform for sharing privately and for helping you connect with services in all kinds of new ways. We’re going to talk about this more in a second.

All right. We are also at the beginning of a golden age of online video. And earlier this month, we opened up Live video to everyone, and the response so far has been pretty amazing. People watch Live videos longer and they comment more than 10 times as much as on regular videos. People love going live because it’s so unfiltered and personal and you feel like you’re just there hanging with your friends. And in a funny way, we found that live takes some of the pressure off of having to find that perfect photo or video, because everyone knows it’s live, and it’s not curated.

Public figures love going Live too, because they are getting huge audiences. We’re seeing TV stars get bigger audiences on Live than they get on their TV shows. So we’re going to build this out. We’re making it a prominent tab in the Facebook app where you can go see what your friends and other people around the world are doing live right now.

Just the other week, I saw a live video of a woman with her young kids skiing down the hill, and it was just mesmerizing. I watched it for like a few minutes because I was just – I am like I really want to make sure these kids get down this hill. You know, there is usually people who are playing music or dancing in there, and then every once in a while there is something that’s really important and special happening. Like a couple of days ago, a woman named Lina commented on one of my posts to tell me that when her mother was sick in the hospital, she streamed her wedding on Live so her mother and her friends across the country could not only see it, but could be there with them. Now that’s pretty meaningful.

So that’s a preview of Live. And today we have a developer announcement around Live too. We are opening up our Live API so now you can build the ability to stream video to Facebook live right into any device. Like for example, this drone flying in from the back of the room — come here, come here. DJI is one of our partners, and this little guy is going to be flying around and streaming F8 live all day together today. So hi everyone. All right, bye bye, drone.

All right. So we have Messenger platform and Live. And these are two of the new ecosystems that we’re going to focus on building out over the next five years, to give everyone in the world the power to share anything they want, with anyone.

So that brings us to 10 years. Over the long term we’re focused on three major areas: connecting everyone to the internet; artificial intelligence to make services more intuitive and natural to use; and virtual and augmented reality, to help us share and experience the world in a much richer way.

So I want to start off by talking about connectivity. So right now more than half of the world, more than 4 billion people don’t have access to the internet. And it turns out that there are three main reasons for why people don’t have access. The first is availability. You don’t live near a network. That’s about a billion people. The second is affordability. You live near a network but you can’t afford to use it. That’s another billion people. And the third reason, which is actually the biggest of all, is awareness – which is you do live near a network and you can afford to use it, but you are not sure why you would spend some of your money on buying a data plan. And that’s about another 2 billion people. So we’re going to work on all of these different barriers.

This is the killer. It’s a solar-powered plane that we’ve designed to beam down internet from the sky. And if you had told me 12 years ago that one day Facebook was going to build a plane, I would have told you that you were crazy. But here we are. It has a wingspan wider than a 737 but it weighs less than a small car. It has solar panels on the whole width of the wings, so it can fly at about 60,000 feet in the air which is about twice as high up as normal commercial flight and it can stay in the air beaming down internet for a few months at a time.

Now check this out. This is an engine bot. This is one of them to give you a sense of the scale. And this is – it’s made of carbon fibers, so it’s actually pretty light. There are about eight of these on each plane, so we’re going to end up building a lot of these for our fleet.

All right. In a few months, we’re going to launch our first satellite into space to connect sub-Saharan Africa and people who don’t have access the networks there. And tomorrow you’re going to hear about two powerful new systems we’ve built to improve connectivity on the ground in urban and rural areas. So we’re really going at this problem from every possible angle.

Now, then there is also affordability. And we can reduce people’s data costs in two ways: Use less data and make data cheaper. So to reduce data consumption, we’ve built a wide framework for our apps. So now we can build apps that take about a quarter as much data as normal apps do.

We’ve also open sourced a tool that I encourage you to check out, called Augmented Traffic Control. And it makes it easier for you to develop services for the next billion people coming online in all different countries around the world by letting you simulate network conditions and all these kinds of different places. So you should check this one out.

Now to make data cheaper, we’re building open source infra for telcos. So it’s kind of like what we have done with the Open Compute Project, and the idea is that if we can make it cheaper for telcos to operate their global infrastructure, then some of those cost savings are going to be passed along to people in the form of lower data prices.

All right. Now finally, we are also working on awareness, by helping people who don’t have access, experience the value of the internet for free. So Free Basics is an open platform that any developer can build for to offer basic internet services to people for free without them having to pay. So they are tools like for education or health, or basic communication services. In Indonesia, people are using a service [Jopong] to find jobs and make job listings. In Columbia, people are using a service 1doc3 to find doctors and get medical advice for free.

Free Basics is already available in 37 countries and it has already given access to internet services to more than $25 million, which makes it one of the most successful connectivity initiatives in the world. And today we are launching the Free Basics Simulator, so now you can see how your services are going to appear on the platform. All right. So that’s connectivity.

The next 10-year challenge that I want to talk about is how we’re going to help connect and share in a more natural and intuitive way. And our goal with artificial intelligence is to build systems that are better than people at perception. It’s of seeing, hearing, language, and so on. And it’s already happening in some places. Our Moments app uses the best face recognition system in the world to help you look at the photos that you have taken and identified which of your friends are in them, so you can share them if you want. Newsfeed uses AI to show you the best stories. And we use AI to filter spam out of Messenger. It’s how you only get messages from people who you want to hear.

Last week, we announced a new way for people who are visually impaired to understand images. We’ve built a tool that can now actually start to look at photos and understand what’s in them, and it can read them out loud to you, if you can’t see the photo. So this is a great use of AI, and it’s an important step towards making sure that everyone has equal access to information.

Now, soon we’re going to be able to do even more. Because right now, to show you the best stories on Newsfeed, we mostly look at some basic signals, like who your friends are, or what pages you like. But we don’t actually understand the meaning of the content. But in the future, we’re going to be able to actually look at the photos and videos and underststand what’s in them. We’re going to be able to read the articles and understand what they are about. And that’s going to let us show more interesting content to you from across our community that we don’t even know that you will be interested in today. So like this [Mob Dog] for me, because that’s my fan.

All right. Now what’s so exciting about AI today is that researchers are using a lot of the same technology to solve completely different problems, like helping astronomers find new planets, or improving self-driving cars, or diagnosing diseases. So in a lot of ways I actually think that advances in AI can help save people’s lives. One of the most amazing examples I have seen recently was an AI system that can now tell from a photo whether a lesion on your skin is skin cancer, with the same accuracy as the best doctors in the world. So imagine that, soon every doctor around the world is just going to have the ability to snap a photo and as well as the best doctors in the world be able to diagnose if you have cancer. That’s going to save lives.

And whether you’re developing social tools or your diagnosing diseases, you are using a lot of the same AI technology. So that’s why we want to make it easier for you all to take advantage of all of the advances in AI technology that we are making. So that way, when we make a 10% improvement in our systems, your systems get 10% better at diagnosing diseases. So that’s why we’ve open sourced our Torch modules to help researchers and engineers train their machine learning models, and why we’ve opened our designs for our GPU servers that we use to train our neural networks. So this way we can all make faster progress together.

All right. One last thing. Finally we are building technology that’s going to change the way that we all experience the world. We started shipping Gear VR for $99 late last year and the response so far has been really amazing. There are already hundreds of apps that are built specifically for Gear and people have watched more than 2 million hours of video in Gear VR.

Last month, we started shipping Oculus Rift and we have one here. Here it is. So for the first time, you can have this kind of premium virtual reality experience in your living room. And from the moment it shipped, it has a great content line-up with more than 50 games on the platform. So check this out for a second.

[Video Presentation]

Later this year, we’re going to release these touch controllers which bring your hands into VR too. So instead of looking around and feeling like you are immersed, you will now also be able to modify the world, where you will be able to pick things up and give them to other people and interact. So it’s going to add a whole new layer of immersion. And one reason why I think that this is also important is that – for our mission is that we’re working on a whole new set of social experience as well across all these different VR platforms. So I think that virtual reality has the potential to be the most social platform because you actually feel like you are right there with another person. So check out this preview of a very early – very simple social experience that you can have. And keep in mind that these people are physically in completely different places, but they feel like they are there with each other playing ping pong, shooting each other, making art and just hanging out, and they feel like they are — you’re actually right there with the person. So this is the kind of social experience that you can have on any existing platform today, and it’s one of the reasons why we are so excited about this.

Now over the next 10 years, the form factor is just going to keep on getting smaller and smaller and eventually we’re going to have what looks like normal looking glasses that can do both virtual and augmented reality. And augmented reality gives you the ability to see the world but also to build overlay digital objects on top of that. So that means, today if I want to show my friends a photo, I pull out my phone and I have a small version of the photo. And in the future, you build to snap your fingers and collate a photo and make it as big as you want and with your AR glasses you will be able to show to people and then they will be able to see it. And as matter of fact, when we get to this world, a lot of things that we think about as physical objects today, like a TV for displaying an image, will actually just be $1 apps in an AR app store. So it’s going to take us long time to make this work. But this is the vision and this is what we are trying to get to over the next 10 years.

Now, before we wrap up today, we have a surprise for you – which is we want each of you to leave with your very own VR experience to take with you. So everyone here is going to get a Gear VR and a Samsung phone to power it. So I am really looking forward to seeing what you guys do with this and they’re going to be ready to pick up later today by registration.

All right. So that’s it. This is how we are doing. That’s the roadmap for the next 10 years. We are building the technology to give everyone the power to share anything they want with anyone else. And everything we are doing is about building technology that brings people together, because whether you just want to hang out with a few friends or start a business, or help solve the world’s problems, the path forward is to connect people. That’s how we make progress together. And that’s why I think the work that we’re all doing together is so important, because if you believe like I do, that when you give more people a voice that, that makes the world better, then we have a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future. And I am excited to work on all of this with all of you.

So thank you everyone. I am going to hand it off to Deb to walk through this in a bit more detail. Have a great F8!

Deb Liu – Head of Payments and Commerce, Facebook

Hey, it is great to be back here at F8. And it’s really hard to believe that it’s been nearly a decade since Facebook platform launched. In fact, the day the Facebook platform launched in 2007, there were 24 million people using Facebook. And I checked, the iPhone was still a month away from being launched.

Today, there are nearly 1.6 billion people using Facebook and nearly 2 billion smartphones being used by people everyday. The world has changed so much and our platform has continued to evolve around with it. Thanks to your feedback and your partnership and your meetings with us and telling us what you are looking for, we’ve continued to develop products to help you build, grow and monetize your apps.

To date, we have paid out nearly $9.5 billion, including substantial growth from audience network. And our developer ecosystem, all of you, is now bigger and more global than ever. We have developers from nearly 250 countries. And in fact, as Mark mentioned, just the past year the number of developers leveraging Facebook platform to build their apps has grown over 40%. And all these countries pictured more than 80% of the top apps used Facebook platform in order to build their app.

But we heard from all of you that you spend a lot of time doing things like translating or documentation so that you can code. And so today we’re excited to share that we are rolling out documentation for all of our major products in 16 languages, and we’ll continue to roll this out and expand this throughout the next year.

The other thing we’ve heard from you is the stability – having a stable platform is critical. So last year we stood up on the stage and promised that we would fix 90% of bugs within 30 days. And I am proud to share that we have exceeded that goal. But you didn’t come here just to hear about the past. I know what you really came to hear – which is what’s the count.

As many of you know, to build a successful app, you need to do three things really well. One, is get people signed up. Two, is to get people engaged and keep them engaged, and three, is to understand what keeps them coming back.

So let’s talk about sign-up. Sign-up is the front gate to your app, and it’s often the hardest for people to get through. So how many times if you guys encountered this? Many times you’re going to have a password you can’t remember with an extra character here and a special character there. And how many times have you wanted a username but it’s been taken and so you have to take another one, which you can’t recall the next time you come back in.

And how many times have you been caught by capture? That’s why eight years ago we introduced Facebook Log-in to help people quickly create and set up accounts with your apps. And today Facebook Log-in is the number one single sign-on product in the world, with hundreds of millions of people logging into your apps every single month. We continue to innovate on this product. In fact, in just the last year we have grown overall conversion rates 10%. And we’ve seen some apps actually reach conversion rate of over 90% with a great implementation.

But we know not everyone has Facebook account. And some people with a Facebook account may want to have more options, such as signing in with their email address, or phone number. But consistently we hear this: people hate usernames and passwords. And that’s why today we are introducing Account Kit.

Account Kit lets people easily and quickly sign into apps with just their email address or phone number, so you don’t have to have a password, you don’t have to have a username. You don’t have to even share any information from your Facebook account. In fact, anyone can use Account Kit even without a Facebook account. And beneath all of this is Facebook’s world-class infrastructure and technology.

Let’s take a look at how it works. You click here on the phone number option. You enter your phone number, and you get an SMS code that you enter there, and you are done. That’s it. It’s that simple. It’s just a few lines of codes implementing your app and it’s completely global with SMS support in 230 country codes, and in more than 40 languages.

We even took the Account Kit for sometime with over 20 partners in 11 countries and we’ve seen great results. Saavn, India’s largest music app, has been testing a side-by-side with Facebook Log-in and Account Kit and they allowed people to sign in with their phone number. In the first two months alone, they saw half a million new phone number registrations. And more amazingly they saw a 33% increase in daily registrations. Imagine your app growing 33% faster every day. Beyond sign-up, you have to grow your app, and you need to grow engagements. Tens of thousands of apps share content to Facebook every day.

How many times have you been reading a book or an article and you want to share it? But there is actually a quote you want to pull out and share with it. Before people took screenshots or maybe you had to cut and paste tabs which is difficult on mobile. But we can make that a lot easier.

So let’s say you are reading a book Originals and you take some texts that you want to share in this quote. You click here, you add your own commentary and it’s done. It’s that simple.

A couple of years ago, we launched Save on Facebook which allowed you to save content for later. And to date every single month, 250 million people use this product. And many of you asked us if we could extend this functionality to your apps and websites as well. And so today we are releasing the Save button for sites off of Facebook. It lets you save interesting articles, products and videos in one place, so you can easily access it from any device later. And we’re testing with 30 developers in 12 different countries.

And let’s take a look at how it works. My husband and I have been planning to take our kids to Asia this summer. And we came across an article about kid-friendly restaurants in [Mila]. Well obviously at this moment, I am not planning my iterinary, so I set it aside. I click Save to facebook and I can come back to it later when we are talking about the things that we want to do. Now I can access it when I go to my Facebook account and there it is, right there. All the items that I save are in one place on Facebook, so I can find it again. And I can get reminders of products go on sale or there is an article that I should revisit later.

Understanding your audience is really important and last year at F8, we introduced Facebook Analytics for apps to help you understand how people are using your apps, so that you can engage them better. And to date over 450,000 apps have used this product. And today we are announcing two new improvements to this product. One is people insights on our analytics dashboard. This will show you aggregated anonymized demographic data for things like page likes and interests for people who use your app, so you can understand how to keep them engaged.

We are also introducing customizable push and in-app notifications. In-app notifications allows you to use animated GIFs, photo, and sounds to engage your audience in your app. That’s just a glimpse of some of the products that we are launching for developers this year. Many of you helped shape these products or gave us these ideas with your talk and your time with us. And we thank you.

And now I’d like to bring up Ime, head of partnerships who will talk about how we can work together to build better products.

Ime Archibong – Director, Product Partnerships, Facebook

As Deb and Mark mentioned, the global growth of our community has been incredible to be a part of over the last couple of years. With 83% of Facebook users now outside of the United States, it actually should be no mystery to anyone that 70% of our developer ecosystem is also there too.

And as part of the team that is responsible for creating these relationships and spending time with you guys, I’ve literally been running around the world trying to meet the best and the brightest of you. When I say running around the world, I literally mean running around the world.

Beyond being an effective way to counterbalance my increasingly global appetite for dessert, I’ve actually found running to be in a very effective way and a non-touristy way to get a feel for the city. It also gives me opportunity to use one of my favorite developer applications Nike+ Running, which in a very small way actually gives me opportunity to bring 500 of my closest friends along with me on these trips – which you can see that beyond capturing stats, it also gives me opportunity to capture how I felt and what I actually see on these trips too. I look at this photo right here of a trail run that I did in Nairobi and I can’t help but think about how special that moment at GES last year in Keyna I was with the team.

But more important than what we felt and what we saw on these trips is actually what we hear and what we learn from you guys. This is a photo from Burlin where we spent some time with a small group of remarkable entrepreneurs. This photo is a similar occasion where we got to spend time with some of India’s greatest innovators. And in each country we’ve walked away with deeper understanding and insights of what actually the opportunities are and also the challenges and complexities that exist inside the local community. However, there are definitely some dramatic things that we’ve seen across the globe and along the way, all of which would be very familiar to any of you that are building applications or products for a global audience.

Mark already mentioned this first one before, but the first global challenge that we’ve seen time and time again is that far too many people are still unconnected. You know, if you have access to the internet today, you are in the minority worldwide. There are still over 4 billion people around the planet right now that remain offline.

The second global challenge that we face is that even for the folks that are online, far too many of them are underserved. They are 90% of the world’s offline population that was within mobile data coverage but only two-thirds of them are actually within mobile broadband coverage – which means that there is a billions of people today that are still only within 2G coverage or no coverage at all.

And lastly, even for the folks that are online, the relevancy of the content and how that relates to their lives remains a challenge and a struggle. Just for example, there are over 7000 languages that are spoken around the world but only 55 of them right now are currently being supported in a robust way online. Put it differently, there are still billions of people right now where their primary and their secondary language aren’t supported well online. So collectively as a community, we look at these challenges, they might feel a bit daunting, but I actually want to ensure you today as builders that if we look at them in isolation, there are actually some thoughtful and tactical solutions that we can put forward to actually improve the lives of people around the world.

First, as builders, you are focused on building for the historically unconnected. I urge you to think about things like affordability of your products and also how you let people understand and know how your products are going to touch their lives. Our primary approach to this thus far has been the Free Basics platform that Mark talked about earlier, as part of our broader Internet.org connectivity efforts and now with well over 500 services available on this platform, based on our estimates we’ve brought 25 million people online — who were online before across the 37 different countries that Mark alluded to before.

If you are thinking about building for the underserved, as builders, I would encourage you to think about things like data efficiency, low device product design, because as we tackled these things head on, we came up with something as special as Facebook Lite, which is less than 1 megabyte footprint and downloads in seconds even on 2G connectivity. To date, as a result of this focus, there are over 100 million people around the world that are using Facebook Lite making it our fastest growing Facebook product ever.

And the last but not least, when you think about relevancy of your products and of your services, we’d encourage you to not think about something as simple as languge localization trivialing, it truly pays dividend. Across Facebook today we actually support over 90 languages and have many more in the pipeline because we know that if we are going to be a part of product and a company that support in the entire world, we have a lot of work to do there.

So we share these challenges and these learnings with you because they’ve influenced how we have been building our products, and most importantly for the people in the room today how we are building platform to serve you, and yes, our products are reaching the globe, 1.6 billion almost exactly, to be exact. But ultimately we know that it’s going to be the local entrepreneurs, it’s going to be the local developers that are truly building these services that are going to touch and be relevant for their local communities. Therefore our platform roadmap has to support you, and we need your feedback, we need to engage with you to understand how we can serve you best.

Just last year, we took a trip to Columbia and I got the opportunity to connect with part of the team from 1doc3, a digital platform that allows real doctors to answer user submitted medical questions online. Now the team at Undoctrace was really interested in connecting with a population of people who have actually never been to the doctor before. So they focused really hard on creating content specific to that demographic and then they launched it on the free basics platform. And we sit here today now, fast forward a couple months, and 21% of their traffic is coming from the free basics platform, which is remarkable. They have been able to launch in four of their markets where they weren’t previously able to reach. And they are now hitting this population of people and learning about how to provide services to a rural population that they wouldn’t have before, which is actually improving the services they are able to provide to everyone across their service even folks that aren’t on the free basics platform, which truly underscores what we continue to say is that the more people that come online, the better it is for all of us.

So it’s impact like these and stories like this which make us very very committed to serving you, and it’s the reason why we’ve received direct feedback from folks like 1doc3 and other developers around the world to build better platform tools for you. Mark talked about it earlier today with the Free Basics Simulator and demographic insights, it’s something that truly came from feedback from this community. So now developers like 1doc3 can properly test their application before they launch it on our platform and they are also armed with more granular data so they can make more content even hyper-specific to the population that they are trying to reach.

It’s impact like this, that we continue to invest in programs like FbStart. It was only two years ago where we announced FbStart on this very same F8 stage so that we could formally give you guys benefits and value, and you guys have shown that this is working for you. We sit here today with almost 9000 members around the world covering 136 different countries, truly remarkable growth and we’re proud of this program. I’d continue to urge anyone in here who is not a part of the FbStart program to apply for the FbStart program. Mainly because in order for us to build meaningful tools and platform tools for this community and its ecosystem we need to engage with you in that way. This is a photo from an event that we had just last year when we traveled down to Brazil. And while we love bringing ideas to thousands of developers in moments like these, actually the best part of these events is what happens when we get off-stage. And it’s moments like these, when we get to sit down, we get to sit with you, truly engage and listen to you and understand how we can best meet you exactly where you are, not just geographically and not just culturally but increasingly so more importantly, technically.

All right. There are number of products that are going to announce here today and have been announced already, that come from direct feedback from this community. While as this ongoing global conversation continues to happen. In fact, the third of everyone here today that traveled here today has a password, I guess you want to raise your hands – it’s a fantastic community. There are thousands, thousands of people around the world at one of our 29 meet-ups that are watching this live right now. So in short, we are not taking this global commitment in this global fashion trivially.

So I am going to leave you this one thought. If you are out there in the audience, if you are out there around the world right now, if you are an entrepreneur, if you are a developer, if like us you are builders, I am asking you to step into your responsibility to build for people first and to build for your community. Because we as a growing tech company, a growing platform company, are going to remain committed to unlocking opportunities for creativity, and for innovation to continue to emerge all across this globe and all across these different platforms. It’s not just Facebook, not just Instragram, not just Free Basics, not just Oculus, but one that I am actually increasingly more excited about these days and that everyone has talked about a little bit – Messenger platform.

So now to give you a little bit of taste of the evolution of the Messenger platform, I am going to hand things off to Vice President of Product on Messenger, David Marcus. Thank you.

David Marcus – Vice President, Messaging Products

Thanks, Ime. Since last F8, a lot has happened. We made Messenger faster than ever before and built on our strengths of core messaging, photo, video sharing, animated GIFs, stickers, emojis, VoIP and more by adding high quality cross-platform video calling that people absolutely love, better location sharing and enhanced group features.

We’ve also welcomed more content than expression apps to the platform from iconic brands that enable you to find the right content at the right content for the right conversation. And for the first time ever, we actually allowed ourselves to build little, delightful surprises in our products, like the ability for you to gift wrap your message for Valentine’s Day, or our little March Madness basketball game. Those two experiences have been used and played hundreds of millions of times over a very short time period. By the way, my top score at basketball is 34, just want to put it out there.

So those experiences are really awesome, because they put a smile on the face of so many people and enables them to really delight and surprise their friends. All of these product enhancements means that more people use and love Messenger everyday. With over 900 million people using Messenger every month, it is now one of the fastest growing products in the world. And as a matter of fact, according to Nielsen, in 2015 it was the fastest growing app in the US. It’s also the second most popular app on iOS globally, just behind Facebook.

Last year, I also shared that we were going to start experimenting and building experiences with businesses and services.Over 40 partners have built commerce, transportation, customer service, and more recently, air travel experiences through the platform. And the results have been completely incredible. People love to interact with businesses and services inside of Messenger. It also makes the product a more central part of people’s daily lives. Let’s take a look at how all of this comes together.

[Video Presentation]

Now, this is what we come for work every morning for. And the future we are going to build together is even more exciting. But before I go there, let me take a step back and look at the evolution of interactions between people and businesses. First, before the internet era everything was conversational. You had to walk to a store or travel agent or an office and talk to someone to get what you needed.

Then came the web. And with it, we traded personalization and conversation for interactions at a much, much larger scale. Then came the mobile era – which initially only offered stripped-down versions of web which eventually led to the app world we currently live in. Apps are truly incredible and they’ve changed our lives in a profound way. They’ve also enabled start-ups to become multi-billion dollar companies in the process. But we download fewer and fewer apps and we certainly don’t turn on push notifications for new downloaded apps anymore.

Meanwhile, mobile web is still frustrating at times. And email overload is a reality, especially on mobile. We also call busineses from time to time when we need to deal with urgent issues, or need to talk to someone right now. But honestly – [thank you for calling. Please make your selection from the following options…] it’s not that great.

Meanwhile, Messenger has a lot of great properties. It’s instant, persists identity from all participants at all times, it’s always in context, and all threads are always canonical. That means that we’re bringing the best of all of these methods of interactions that I just shared into one place. Add to that, the 50 million businesses that are active on Facebook Pages and the 1 billion messages that are sent every month from people on Messenger to those businesses, and you have the making of a great new platform right there. This is why I am really really excited to launch the beta version of our Messenger platform today. And this means that you will be able to build your Bot for Messenger using our brand new Send/Receive API starting this afternoon.

So let’s take a look at what those capabilities enable and I am going to show you an amazing experience that Spring built with their personal shopping assistant. First, you will be able to discover and access bots in a variety of ways, and I’ll get to that in a minute. Second, all bots will persist identity at all times, basically that of your page, plus a little bit more context. Third, bots will be enabled to send and receive not only texts but also images, special bubbles, buttons and calls to action. Because we really believe that in order to build a great user experience, we need a hybrid approach of conversational elements and UI.

Many people have been talking about bots as a command line interface. This is not the way we see it. We think that the combination of UI and conversation is what’s going to work. So let’s go buy shoes. Let’s see. I am going to go with sneakers, because I want to abide by Facebook’s dress code. Yes, 75 to 250 seems about right. And now I am going to get a carousel of products that are curated just for me. And as I said before, we really like those rich interfaces, because you can’t do much just with texts. So now I am going to basically just swipe through the products, find the ones I want and then go buy them. I just get to an optimized product page that renders right there in Messenger and then I am back to the thread with a receipt, which is basically one of the many templates that you will have access to later today. By the way these sneakers are awesome.

So the Spring experience is going live today. And I have to tell you watching people on my team play with this experience in the last days and weeks, I can guarantee you, you are going to spend way more money than you want on this. It’s just really addictive.

So now you can build a lot more experiences than commerce. Mark showed you a few with CNN and 1800Flowers, thanks for the flowers by the way. But truly, your imagination is the only limit here. So let’s meet my new Bot on Messenger, Poncho, the weather cat.

So Poncho is not your usual weather forecast service. It is a weather cat, and it’s got a dry and witty sense of humor and it delivers the weather in a really fun way that will guarantee to put a smile on your face every morning. What I love about this experience is how the team behind Poncho really worked on the timing and flow of the conversation to make it feel really natural and really awesome. So let’s watch as Poncho delivers the weather forecast for San Francisco. Told you, not your usual weather forecast service. So Poncho is also going live today and I would strongly encourage you to try it.

Now, with all of these new user experiences coming to Messenger, we really want to ensure that the experience stays amazing, high signal and the way you want. So while most of the experiences that you have seen today are started by people, not by bots, not by businesses, we’re also conducting small scale experiments with businesses to enable them to re-engage their existing customers through sponsored messages.

So as a second line of defense, we’ve built very prominent user controls at the top of every thread you will have with bots and businesses that will enable you to block specific types of messages or all messages coming from this bot. Because we want to make sure that you are always in control of your Messenger experience.

Now, let’s talk about discovery. Because it’s really important to us that if you build great experiences for Messenger, they are easy to find and access. First, you will have Messenger Plug-ins, and you will be able to drop those plug-ins on your website, in your app, on your emails, everywhere. Second, Codes, Usernames and Links, we just launched this last week, it also applies to businesses and bots.

Third, a search discovery surface. So now the search bar on Messenger is going to stay persistent at the top of Messenger at all times and by capping on it, you will access a search discovery surface that will enable you to discover and search for all the bots on the platform.

Now let’s talk about Customer Matching for a bit. Because a lot of you are already sending text messages to your customers, and we want to make it really easy for you to get the benefit of everything that I just talked about today. So we’ve built a tool that enables you to match your opted-in customers’ phone numbers to a Messenger account so that you can send to Messenger instead of sending to SMS. So you will be able to do that directly, of course, or work with partners the first one of which is Twilio, so next time you receive your Postmates’ delivery update on Messenger instead of SMS, you will know what’s happening behind the scenes.

Now, last thing is that coming soon, we’ll give everyone the ability for you to buy Newsfeed ads on Facebook that will take people directly to your bot in Messenger. And that’s going to be an amazing way to combine new user acquisition with retention.

Now let me talk about M for a minute. Some of you may know M is our early stage digital assistant that learns more by combining AI with human trainers. In the last six months, we’ve learned a lot, and notably that we needed to build a variety of small vertical bots to help resolve intent for people. So the Wit.ai team, which is part of the Messenger team built this very powerful tool that was originally intended for our own internal use but that I am glad to open up to everyone today. This will enable you to build very very high end conversational self-learning bots.

Now let me be clear: you don’t need to use this tool to build a bot on Messenger. For that the Send/Receive API that I just talked about earlier is more than enough. But if you want to build more complex bots, you can now use our Bot Engine. Let me show you how it works.

You feed the Bot Engine with sample conversations, and then it can handle any variation of that conversation on its own. Using AI and machine learning, it just gets better and better, over time you don’t need to code everything, it will do the job for you. So this is going to be available today as well.

Now we can’t build this ecosystem on our own. We have fabulous partners we have been working with that have built or are building not only bots but tools for brands and businesses around the world to participate in this ecosystem, and really iconic brands that we’re very proud to work with.

So while today is a beta launch, which means that we’ll gradually improve bots before they are published on the platform, every single tool that I described earlier, the Send/Receive API, the Bot Engine, documentation, the ability for you to test and all of that will be available to all of you globvally when I step down from this stage. So you can build your bot today.

There are two great sessions, one today and tomorrow that I strongly encourage you to attend if you want to really learn more. And you can also visit Messenger.com/platform to learn more.

Now before I leave, and let you build your bots, I just want to leave you with a thought. I shared with you that today we are going to enable you to build bots and your presence for 900 million people worldwide on the platform, that we’re going to let these people find your bot and your experiences in a variety of ways. And that we’re going to give you the tools to build more complex bots if you need to with our Bot Engine. So maybe – maybe today is the first day of a new era, one in which the opportunity to build the breakthrough experiences and companies of tomorrow emerges again.

I can’t wait to see what you are going to build for our community and our platforms in the weeks and months to come, and with that, I am going to hand it over to Chris. Thank you.

Chris Cox – Chief Product Officer, Facebook

All right. So it’s very cool to be here in Fort Mason, because a few blocks away from here, 48 years ago, one of the very interesting pages in the history of computer science was written, when a young scientist named Douglas Engelbart took the stage to present the culmination of several years’ worth of work at the Stanford Resarch Institute to build a design of a North Star of what would be possible with personal computers over the next 10 years. And he wasn’t just going to talk about it, he was actually going to demonstrate the whole thing live in an end-to-end prototype. And sitting in the audience that day were most of the luminaries of the computer science industry back where you can fit them all in a small auditorium. This included Andries van Dam, the man who would go on to write the Bible on Computer Graphics, Alan Kay, the guy who would create object-oriented programming in a first tablet, and Stewart Brand who had created the The Whole Earth Catalog, and would go on to create the WELL, the very first online social network. He was also the guy running the camp on that day and the man who would later call the event what we all know it as now, the Mother of All Demos.

So Douglas Engelbart over the next hour would lay out one by one most of the foundational elements that we use today almost 50 years later when we use a computer. He plugged-in a mouse, he clicked on an icon, windows appeared, he resized them, he moved them around, there were hyperlinks, there was copy-pasting, there was keyword searching, most of this stuff had never been seen before, a lot of it was completely theoretical. So to see all of this working end to end for all of these people at once was a really big deal. And minds were blown. And because it was a tech demo, there was one more thing at the end – a video conference.

Now, video conference in 1969 was a tremendously difficult thing to engineer. They needed special modems, one in Menlo Park and one in San Francisco to transmit the texts they were typing to each other, and they needed micro-wavelengths – one in Menlo Park, one in San Franciso, and some guy had to drive a van up to San Bruno Mountain over there, so they could get the video back and forth, at a low enough latency it felt real and good. And this was a moment where that small group assembled there, saw the idea, that the personal computer was going to be an amazing productivity tool but it was also going to be a window into another place. And it was going to be about connecting us with each other.

And there at the Mother of All Demos, a human face stole the show. And that’s why it shouldn’t be a surprise that as mobile phones become incredibly powerful computers, more and more of what we are doing there is video and it’s about connecting. The math on this is insane. 50% of the mobile internet today is mobile video, that’s on track to be 75% in 5 years. In 2021, the mobile video internet will be 6 times larger than the entire mobile internet today, which is crazy.

In terms of time spent, the average American today will spend 4 hours watching video across all of these technologies. Around the world that’s a little bit smaller but it’s growing very very quickly as phones get better, connections get better and more and more people get on to the internet. 4 hours a day is a lot of time. That’s one-sixth of your life. And that’s why the other trend here that’s so interesting is the shift that’s happening from video being about passive entertainment to video being about connectedness. The more we put video inside of our experiences, the more we see the emergence of little bits of vibrancy and little bits of creativity.

Just two day after we began to roll out Messenger video calling, we saw over a million calls because of how seamlessly video is stitched into messaging. The more creative tools like hyperlapse and layout and Boomerang that the Instagram team builds, the more we see the emergence of a new type of story telling. In just the last six months, time spent watching video on Instagram has grown by over 40%, and as more and more people get instant articles, they actually start to open them 20% more and abandon the story 70% less as they start to see a bunch of these in their feed, and that’s first because the experience loads so much more quickly but it’s also because the reading experience is a lot more immersive, especially in the way that you can look at multi-media like videos and photo albums. And as we’ve started to bring this to ads, we’re starting to see some really cool stuff get built.

This is an ad for cruise from Carnival. People that opened these little booklets spent on average 30 seconds inside of there which is insane for an ad. Some of these features like profile picture videos, we weren’t sure, were going to be huge, but in just a week after beginning to roll this out on Android, we saw over 2 million people create new profile picture videos, and a lot of them were coming from a handful of really cool selfie cam apps.

So we wanted to help accelerate and unlock this, which is why we are starting by announcing today this Profile Expression Kit. So if you are building a selfie cam app, or another app, whatever your favorite app is for creating video, you can plug this in seamlessly to Facebook, which is going to be swift.

So we’re going to keep on weaving video into our experiences and we’re going to keep on building these creative tools and giving them to you guys where it makes sense.

All right. So now I want to talk about some crazy – two crazy big challenges we are taking on at video. The first is 360. So the first time you see a really nice 360 experience in VR, you will remember it. It’s like there is an IMAX on my face. And I have to go tell everybody about it. You remember where you were, you remember what you saw, and since we first started seeing this, we have all been obsessed with this idea that this was going to be a part of how you would capture and share your experience in the full immersiveness that you are experiencing it with someone somewhere else. And it’s becoming more and more of what people are doing inside of VR, and more and more of how people are experiencing their feed.

I saw this video in my Newsfeed, my friend Johnny again posted it, as he was skiing down the Matterhorn. And what’s so cool is even on a phone, you actually experience like the bumps with him, you feel the video. And he had a pretty good time creating it, although he had to use doug tape and like a selfie stick and some GoPros, and that’s just because the 360 camera ecosystem is still pretty nascent. And the reason it’s nascent is that creating a really high quality 360 video is very difficult. It requires a lot of cameras. And as soon as you get a lot of cameras, you have another set of problems on your hands – getting the shutters to open and close together, stitching the images together, dealing with blurring, and then dealing with color correction. Assuming you can get all of those problems out, you have a lot of information and you need to figure out how to compress and get into memory and then into disc in a way that preserves the fidelity of the image and doesn’t overheat your whole system.

And as we started to look at the ecosystem, we realized that there were a lot of cool stuff getting built but there wasn’t anything out there that did all of these things extremely well and was durable and portable and didn’t require a ton of post-processing. So we set out to build the perfect 360 camera. And we ordered a bunch of parts on the internet, and like stitched the camera together and we started learning the first of about a thousand lessons.

The first is that if you put these things inside of a plastic housing and take them up on the roof, and shoot more than a few minutes of video, starts to get hot. The cameras get hot and the computer gets hot. And if it warps the plastic for just a millimeter, suddenly the lens just gets a little bit out of whack and the whole thing is ruined. And it’s just because the eye is so sensitive, especially when you put it in the immersive environment, that you can’t have any errors, everything needs to be completely dialed in.

And then once you get the shutters and the cameras and the color correction and the stitching and the blurring, really difficult when there are stuff moving across several lenses, especially if you want to do it in 3D at high resolution at 60 frames per second, you have a massive amount of information. There wasn’t a good compression out there, good enough for this, so we had to create a whole bunch of math, that looks like this. But when we got it right, the output started to look like this. And this is the first like really nice moment where we got this thing up on top of the roof. You put this thing on in VR, you put it on in the camera, it’s wonderful. You really feel like you are in a place.

This is it, when we took it at the Grand Central Station. This is cool because you can see so many different little scenes happening everywhere. And the most amazing part about this, Brian, you should come on up here, man. Brian is the architech for what I am about to show you. Brian, this is so read, man. This is red. This is really really cool. After this video was hot, there was very little post-production required, it’s an order of magnitude less post-production, which is a huge deal. So I am very proud to announce today – are you ready, Brian? – the Facebook Surround 360. This is a professional grade 3D 360 camera, it can record 2 hours of fully sync-ed 3D 360 video at up to 60 frames per second, with up to 8K in each eye. So it’s exceptionally high quality. It is rugged enough to survive travel and professional filming on location, and because of the way we’ve developed the software, it spits out footage that’s ready to upload with very little post-processing like I said.

We’ve already taken this thing on shoots with a bunch of professional teams and every single one has remarked to us just how special this thing is. And we are not planning on getting into the camera business. So we are planning on open-sourcing the hardware and software for all of this. This is going to be available on GitHub later this summer. So if you are a hardware hacker, if you are a professional, we hope that you find in here some solutions that help you figure out how to contribute back to this ecosystem of creating really really cool captivating high resolution, easy to shoot, store and stream experiences to send to the people around you.

All right. So the next big challenge we’re going to talk about is Live. So Live, it turns out – I have at least discovered recently, it is a lot harder than streaming video, because you want hundreds of thousands of people to experience the exact moment at the exact same instant wherever they are in the world, no matter kind of device they are using and no matter what kind of connection they have. And if you get all of that right, you get this real-time raw authentic moment shared by a lot of people instantaneously which is amazing. And that’s why we’ve spetd a bunch of time over the last few months putting Live really as an integral part of the Facebook experience. So whether you are watching the President read the jobs report from one of the White House staffers, or my personal favorite is DJ Jazzy Jeff, it’s just killing it right now, as the Live streamer.

You can go to this tab and it’s a nice blend of two things. The first is quickly being able to see all of the top live streams around the world, which is an awesome experience, and the second is to be able to dive into the things that are being published directly from the people you care about.

So our early adopters are super excited that they don’t need one of these anymore to create and stream a Live experience. But what we are hearing is all these crazy stories about building things that look like. So more and more people are trying to deal with audio and sound and stabilization, and as soon as you look at this, like the jet cameraman holding this rig, that holds an iPhone, you kind of know immediately this is not what the future is supposed to look like. And that is why we have announced today the Live API. So this will allow hardware and software to plug directly into Facebook Live, and the launch partners are pretty cool.

So this is the first one. This is called the Meebo. It’s from Livestream. It’s small, it’s portable, it’s quite attractive, it charges with USB, and it will allow you to just tap this thing and we’re going to try this out. It’s sync-ing with my account, and now we’re live. So this is streaming Live on Facebook. And what this will allow you to do is let’s say you’re at Tastemade, these women have created a really cool social interactive cooking show. And right now they are like dealing with a phone. This will allow them to just put a little camera somewhere you can travel with it, it will follow them around or you can use a little controller to quickly cut between scenes and edit. Sheryl, I am especially excited to give this to you. I get to watch Sheryl doing these like legit, Lean-In livestreams with [Anne Le Babits], and some portion, it’s like trying to get this whole thing right with an iPhone. This is going to be perfect for you.

It’s also going to be really good for software, so bit prezzo is a super simple way of taking live streams in, editing between them and overlength graphics. Our friends at BuzzFeed have been working on a video game, or a live game show which will allow you to interact with fans directly. These guys have been challenging our concurrent streaming limit with a Watermelon BuzzFeed, so I am very excited to see what you guys do with this.

And last, we wanted to get this on some drones, so as Mark showed you, we’ve actually worked with DJI and Keith, an amazing production company. These guys are out here with barges that are streaming WiFi up to drones that are streaming this video live on Facebook. It’s especially difficult today because the weather is a little tricky. And this is also going to enable really good videographers like Trey Ratcliff’ who is an incredibly good drone videographer to take you with him. And because the comments are going to stream in live on his little controller, he’s going to be able to ask the audience where they want to go, which is sweet. So if you own a Phantom, a software update will be coming to you later this month, which will allow you take people with you, take in their comments, and have to be able to directed drone life journey. Cool!

So when we add these two big areas of technology together, the first is really about these immersive 360 streaming experiences. The second is really about taking people with you whether it’s a small scenario, like something really cool going on with you and your friends at sunset or whether it’s the President. What we are most excited about right now is just the endless possibilities of what can be done with these two things for how we connect to each other. And so we’re very very excited to see what you guys do.

While putting this together I was just reflecting on my own experience growing up in the 80s, if somebody in your town got a video camera, you ran over to their house, and it was like a Panasonic huge thing. And you like dressed up and enacted a music video. And it was because as kid, we all have this little creative spirit that wants to make a little film and to share it. And to have my 1980s little me, looking out at where we are right now, it’s like billions of people are getting powerful production tools, streaming increasingly super immersive nice experiences, and doing immediately live to anybody in the world, I feel like we are very very lucky to be here and that’s part of why today is going to be so cool.

So I want to thank you guys all for being here today, especially those of you who have traveled from far away. It means a lot to us that you guys are here. This is the end of the keynote session. I am reminded that Darryl Douglas was probably right in that the real application of computers is probably going to be about connecting with each other. So that’s what today is all about. Go out and see some amazing demos. Thank you guys for being here. We really appreciate it. Thanks.

 

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