Barcelona MWC: Zuckerberg Interview

The last event of the day at Mobile World Congress was an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook. Obviously with 120,000 people here, not everyone that wanted to attend was going to get into the hall and luckily I was nearby 90 minutes before it started and saw that there were already hundreds of people in line. So I got in line and sat on the floor (concrete with a thin carpet gets uncomfortable really fast, I can report). Luckily, one hour before the start they opened up the auditorium so we got so sit and wait for the last hour. Mark has been at the last four Mobile World Congresses. He made a surprise appearance at the Samsung Galaxy handset announcement, and was also spotted jogging near La Sagrada Familia over the weekend.

He was interviewed by Jessi Hempel of Wired magazine. While they sorted out some microphone problems, she asked him about the major event of his recent life, the birth of his daughter Max (Maxima), who is now 3 months old.

The next thing they talked about was Internet access. About 2B people in the world have access to the Internet, increasingly through mobile rather than desktop. But that means that there are 4B people who do not have Internet access. Mark worries that the economics of the move to 5G really only depend on the rich (us) and that we risk having better and better access for us, and still no access for the other 4B people. For example, even in India there are nearly 1B people with no Internet access, "only" 250M people do have access. Facebook (FB) has a program called Free Basics which lets people have access to some services such as...well, Facebook for one, but also news, healthcare and more...for free. Their experience has been that a lot of the poor don't know why they would want to pay for Internet so giving it to them for free makes it clear. FB has found that 50% of Free Basics (FB again, what a coincidence) convert to paying customers within a few months. So far they have got 19M people onto the Internet for the first time. Unfortunately, in India, the government (or courts) just declared Free Basics to be illegal on the basis that you can't bundle access that way.

Other ways they are trying to bring more Internet access include a project called TIP (telco internet project) to get equipment to be cheaper, thus lowering the barrier to deploying networks. This is modeled on their open compute project that makes all the hardware design that FB creates for their datacenters available as open source so that others can take advantage of it. That creates a virtuous cycle that drives volume and, in turn, lower prices, which drives volume and so on. FB benefits from those lower prices, of course.

Another well-known project is the FB drone program. The idea is to create a solar-powered drone that can fly for three to six months. It is the size of a 747 but only weighs as much as a car. They are also working on steered laser technology as an alternative to microwave to create high-bandwidth connections from the drone. They have smaller versions of the drone built already and flying every week. There is a lot of focus on testing since obviously you don't want the drones to fall out of the sky, especially if they fall on something like a school.

The big challenge is doing hardware development the way agile software development is done. They'll have a version flying within 18 months. Regulation might be a problem, but there are lots of governments that really want something like this. The Brazilian rainforest is not densely enough populated for a traditional cellular build-out, so a drone flying overhead is very attractive.

FB doesn't try and make money on these projects. Mark complained that people don’t take them at face value on this. But they really just want to help people get on the internet. Free Basics sites don't even have advertising. Obviously, FB benefits somewhat once people start using it, and they have an advertising-supported business model they are happy with. He pointed out that he never started out to build a company, just enable connections at his "college" (Harvard). He then decided the company was the best way to align everything. Having a for-profit company is an effective way to make change in the world.

What about virtual reality (VR)? FB bought Oculus, after all. Mark thinks VR is the next thing after video. He pointed out that when he took his first steps, his mother noted it on paper in a diary. When his cousin did, her mother took a photo. Another cousin was videotaped. He has six to nine months before his daughter walks, and fully expects to record it in VR so that it is a totally immersive experience for anyone that he sends it to, like grandparents. He thinks it will be one of the key apps that drives 5G since sending two 4K video streams to an Oculus takes a network beyond what we have today. LTE has really made video possible and increasing amounts of video is the biggest thing happening in FB today. He said 100M hours of video are watched per day on FB.

Mark freely admitted that they messed up the transition to mobile (twice) and it took them a long time to get it right. With video and virtual reality, he is hoping they don't have any major false starts.

Mark and his wife have said they will give away 99% of their fortune. But they didn't, as Jessi put it, just "set up a foundation and slap their name on it." Mark said that they had actually done that, "maybe not slapping the name on but gently attaching it." But he believes that non-profits are appropriate sometimes, but at other times, it makes sense to invest in a more commercial manner in, for example, a company working on cures for cancer. But it is really early and something they will be working on for decades. If you look at the world, a lot of narrative is around how things are getting worse but things are getting better in so many aspects (health up, violence down). A big driver is technology. We all look at the world and want our children to live dramatically better lives than we did, just like we are doing compared to our parents.

They covered some other topics, too, but Mark's theme for the evening was that 5G is important for all sorts of things like high bandwidth and low latency. But we also need to use it to "finish the job" and get the whole world connected to the Internet.

Tomorrow: ARM's Simon Segar's keynote on security