On stage at Samsung’s event, Mr Zuckerberg called virtual reality technology “the next platform”, and explained his belief that VR headsets will become the social hubs of the future, with users gathering around them in order to connect to friends around the world. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that “forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy”, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey thanked Apple CEO Tim Cook for his leadership in this area.
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“The important thing for me is always to preserve fairness as you know we were not part of the Facebook experiment…”
“That’s disappointing for the mission of what we’re trying to do, and is obviously a major setback in India” Zuckerberg admitted, but remained bullish about Internet.org’s continued work in India. So far, 36 countries are benefiting from Free Basics and the number could be higher than that had it not be that politics in certain countries like Chile led to the rollback of the service. “We’ve recently created new teams at Facebook to build the next generation of social apps and VR”.
He says the banned service, Free Basics, is only one program in his Internet.org campaign, so he can proceed with other initiatives. Even if for free. So we’re full aligned with everyone else in the ecosystem. “A lot of people think that companies don’t care about anything other than making money”, Mr. Zuckerberg added. “But our real goal, is just to help people get on the internet”, he said. He described the 5G network as “faster connections for richer people”. Zuckerberg hopes to roll out at least 10 000 of these boxes before the end of the year. “And now it’s really becoming video”, said Zuckerberg.
After watching a video in VR, audience members took off their headsets and were treated to a surprise presentation from Zuckerberg in which he announced that Facebook and Samsung are partnering to to make VR videos more social. As the networks get better and better that’s going to be more and more of what you share. “It doesn’t need to feel like it’s super curated”. “It’s a bit more personal and raw, and a reason to just be yourself”. I think education for example…
“Network operators are evolving away from traditional services such as voice and text towards data”. First trials, he said, would happen this year.
In fact, Zuckerberg is keen to play up the common interests of Facebook and the service providers over whose networks his application runs, arguing that the Facebook/operator relationship “is more symbiotic than tense”.
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While Free Basics was only about providing specific content to consumer devices.
