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February 28, 2020
Your backup plan is surely in effect by now. Because coronavirus is coming for tech conferences left and right. Hopefully the plane tickets were refundable.
In the last day alone we lost F8, the Google News Initiative Global Summit, as well as an internal Google marketing conference, IDC's Directions and Shopify Unite. The Game Developers Conference next month seems bound to follow, as Facebook, Microsoft, Sony and several other gaming-related companies have already pulled out. (Update at 4:15 p.m.: Follow it did. On Friday afternoon, the organizers of GDC announced that the conference is officially postponed.)
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Those cancellations are being felt acutely by conference attendees, especially developers who were betting on F8 for meetings with Facebook employees to score additional funding for their projects.
"Without F8, you might not have another opportunity like this — another six to eight months at least," said Tima Anoshechkin, CEO and co-founder of the Sydney, Australia-based VR startup Alta VR, which is developing a VR title for multiple platforms.
Doesn't it feel inevitable? If coronavirus continues to spread, it seems almost certain that many if not most of the major upcoming tech conferences this spring will be canceled.
When Mobile World Congress was canceled last month, it felt like a fluke — like things would surely get better. But as we head out of winter into the spring events season, concerns that COVID-19 could turn into a pandemic have only increased. More and more event organizers are taking the precaution of canceling their events for the safety of attendees.
Anoshechkin, who had planned on flying in for F8, is now nervous as he looks toward GDC, the most important conference of the year for his startup of 12 employees. Although GDC said in a statement published on its website on Friday that the show would go on, organizers added they were "closely monitoring the COVID-19 (coronavirus) situation" and would update their "assessment if the situation changes."
Still, Anoshechkin says at least 30% of his meetings at GDC have been canceled already, including funding meetings that could have helped Alta VR raise money for its crucial seed round.
Related:
- Question for online travel firms: To refund or not?
- How health tech can change future pandemic responses
- Zuckerberg's college buddy is leading Facebook's coronavirus response
"Everybody who's everybody has pulled out [from GDC]," Anoshechkin said. "That has a massive impact on a company like ours if you can't pitch people."
So what happens when your tech conference gets canceled?
Facebook told Protocol it is still exploring ways to organize an "F8-inspired experience," although it's unclear what that experience could look like.
A source at a major tech company told Protocol that virtual conferences were the most obvious solution to all these conference cancellations. Likewise, several tech conference attendees we spoke to said they expected to see a sharp uptick in virtual conferences this year as more conferences cancel. Yes, conference-goers will lose out on some of the magic of being on the floor, but in the short term, it solves the real challenge for tech companies.
"My hope is that is that these cancellations really light the fire under this idea of virtual conferences and that Facebook puts some money behind that, either by buying an interest in somebody who's working on that type of project or developing that project themselves," said John Westra, virtual innovation officer for Vuturus, an AR and VR firm with offices in Colorado and Michigan. He said he had planned on attending F8. "Sure, there's less serendipity involved, but virtual conferences would also allow more people to attend, particularly people in the industry from all over the world for whom flying to the San Francisco Bay Area is not in their budget."
Many of the biggest and most well-known conferences from Google, Microsoft and Apple have yet to announce their fates, which says nothing of the dozens of smaller conferences and events attended by thousands of people.
In an emailed statement, Sarah Porter, CEO of InspiredMinds, which produces tech events including the World Summit AI next month, said, "I have been in the tech events industry for almost 30 years. In my experience, the events industry are well equipped to deal with situations like this." She added, "Of course, as [organizers] we are evaluating the risk on a daily basis based on outbreaks per region, geography of attendees and so on. However, the risk to the general public remains low in most areas. Those most at risk are those who are elderly or already ill; the profile of the attendees to World Summit AI are not within this category"
While Google has canceled a few events, it hasn't made a call on its important Google I/O and Google Cloud Next events. It plans on monitoring developments around COVID-19, according to a spokesperson. News broke on Friday that a Google employee was officially diagnosed with COVID-19, so odds feel like they're tipping toward Google I/O not going on as planned — at least in its current form.
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That would be a big disappointment for Joshua Ostrom, a Mishawaka, Indiana-based senior software engineer for Simpli.fi, a company focused on localized digital advertising. Ostrom, who won an internal company raffle for one of two Google I/O tickets, looks to the conference as a way to network with some of the best engineering talent in the world.
"It's really just a chance to be around a lot of bright minds," said Westra, whose wife simply refers to Google I/O as "nerdchella." "It makes you excited about your career field and makes it fun to be a programmer."
JP Mangalindan
JP Mangalindan (@jpmanga) is a former senior reporter at Protocol. JP most recently covered the intersection of business and technology as Yahoo Finance’s chief tech correspondent. His work has appeared in Fortune, GQ, Mashable, and New York magazine.
Protocol | China
Everything you need to know about the Zhihu IPO
The Beijing-based question-and-answer site just filed for an IPO.
The Zhihu homepage.
David Wertime/Protocol
March 5, 2021
David Wertime is Protocol's executive director. David is a widely cited China expert with twenty years' experience who has served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, founded and sold a media company, and worked in senior positions within multiple newsrooms. He also hosts POLITICO's China Watcher newsletter. After four years working on international deals for top law firms in New York and Hong Kong, David co-founded Tea Leaf Nation, a website that tracked Chinese social media, later selling it to the Washington Post Company. David then served as Senior Editor for China at Foreign Policy magazine, where he launched the first Chinese-language articles in the publication's history. Thereafter, he was Entrepreneur in Residence at the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2019, David joined Protocol's parent company and in 2020, launched POLITICO's widely-read China Watcher. David is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Contemporary China, a Member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a Truman National Security fellow. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Diane and his puppy, Luna.
Zeyi Yang is a reporter with Protocol | China. Previously, he worked as a reporting fellow for the digital magazine Rest of World, covering the intersection of technology and culture in China and neighboring countries. He has also contributed to the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. In his spare time, Zeyi co-founded a Mandarin podcast that tells LGBTQ stories in China. He has been playing Pokemon for 14 years and has a weird favorite pick.
March 5, 2021
Investors eager to buy a slice of China's urban elite internet will soon have the chance. Zhihu, a Beijing-based question-and-answer site similar to the U.S.-based Quora, has just filed for an IPO to sell American Depositary Shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
What does Zhihu do?
Zhihu is China's largest online Q&A platform — the name comes from the expression "Do you know?" in classical Chinese. It was founded 10 years ago by Yuan Zhou (周源), a former journalist, and spent two years as an invite-only online platform. It quickly built a reputation as a source for quality answers and has drawn a community of elite professionals, including ZhenFund managing partner Bob Xu and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee, also an early investor.
Over time, the Chinese-language Zhihu has become more mainstream, and now says it hosts 315.3 million questions and answers contributed by 43.1 million "creators." (Quora, about one year older than Zhihu, had almost 61 million questions and 108 million answers by the end of 2019). The website has grown into a content platform where people also keep diaries, write fiction and blog as social media influencers.
Zhihu users do not look like China as a whole. Most than half are men, most live in "Tier 1" cities and more than three-quarters are under 30 years old.
Zhihu continues to emphasize the quality of its content. "Zhihu is also recognized as the most trustworthy online content community and widely regarded as offering the highest-quality content in China," its prospectus says.
Zhihu's financials
Zhihu registered for its IPO via the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, a.k.a. the JOBS Act, which has reduced disclosure requirements for companies with less than $1.07 billion in annual revenue. Zhihu's revenue doubled from 2019 to 2020, but still only reached $207.2 million, and the company is short of profitability with a 2020 net loss of $79.3 million. The company says it's "still in an early stage of monetization" with "significant runway for growth across multiple new monetization channels."
Trend lines are good. Zhihu has managed to double revenue while keeping expenses largely constant, with selling and marketing aimed at growing Zhihu's user base as the biggest single expense.
The company is trying to diversify its revenue streams. In 2019, 86.1% came from advertising. 2020 saw advertising account for 62.4% while "content-commerce" — meaning native advertising — took in 10%. The rest was mostly paid memberships.
What's next for Zhihu
After years of evincing a relaxed attitude toward monetization, Zhihu is putting itself in the hot seat to do just that. Zhihu is betting that monetizing Chinese web users will get easier over time. The prospectus describes "significant growth potential" in China's "online content community market" and says average revenue per user in China is expected to more than triple from about $55 in 2019 to about $199 in 2025, with revenue in the overall market reaching a projected $200 billion in 2025.
The company looks like it will basically try everything to monetize, and see what sticks. It plans to "ramp up our online education service" and to "continue to explore other innovative monetization channels, such as content e-commerce and IP-based monetization."
The prospectus also mentions AI frequently, touting Zhihu's AI content moderation tool wali as well as a "question routing system" and "feed recommendation and search systems." However, the depth and quality of content remains far more important to Zhihu's success. Users have joked on Zhihu about the poor quality of its wali filter.
What could go wrong?
Zhihu could fail to turn a profit. Like most content platforms, Zhihu has found it hard to monetize its traffic and the vast amount of free content at its core. The platform was built on the premise that anyone can acquire professional knowledge easily, which means users are not inclined to pay.
Since 2016, Zhihu has tried many monetization models: paid physical/virtual events, online courses taught by its top creators, premium memberships and paid consulting services. None have been a hit. Zhihu Live, the paid virtual event product, attracted a lot of public attention in 2016 and 2017, but since then its popularity has waned. According to the prospectus, Zhihu currently has 2.4 million paying members, or only 3.4% of its monthly active users.
Zhihu also faces intense competition. Defined narrowly, it has no rivals, with would-be contenders like Baidu Zhidao and Wukong, owned by ByteDance, falling by the wayside. But Zhihu has positioned itself as something more: a community for diverse content. In this regard, it's competing with big public-facing social media platforms such as the Twitter-like Weibo and Bilibili. While Zhihu's 68.5 million monthly active user base is growing fast, Weibo has over 500 million and Bilibili over 200 million. Zhihu differentiates itself with the quality and depth of its content, but maintaining that creates inevitable tension with the business imperative to expand.
Like every content platform in China, Zhihu is subject to rigid state censorship and faces harsh penalties for failing to police speech itself. Politically-sensitive questions are nowhere to be found on the platform, while other topics including transgender rights have been censored in the past. Even so, in March 2018, Zhihu was taken off every mobile app store for seven days at the request of Beijing's municipal Cyberspace Administration. Authorities did not specify why, but the suspension probably related to subtle criticisms of Xi Jinping on the platform; Zhihu promised to "make adjustments."
Zhihu's prospectus is largely mum on the censorship question, perhaps because the company feels it's gotten good enough at doing it. Zhihu says it has a "comprehensive community governance system" that combines "AI-powered content assessment algorithms" with the ability of users to report each other as well as "proprietary know-how." These resemble the same tools most big Chinese social media platforms use to censor content and keep in Beijing's good graces.
Who gets rich?
Here's what we know:
- Founder, CEO and Chairman Yuan Zhou currently owns 8.2% of Zhihu, with another 8% worth of options, which he can exercise within 60 days of the IPO, held in a separate holding company controlled by a trust of which he is the beneficiary. Following exercise, Zhou will have the vast majority of aggregate voting power.
- Innovation Works, beneficially owned by Peter Liu and Kai-Fu Lee, owns 13.1% of Zhihu. According to corporate database Qichacha, Innovation Works invested about $153,000 in an angel round in January 2011, then made follow-on investments in the C and D rounds.
- Tencent owns 12.3%.
- Qiming Entities owns 11.3%. According to corporate database Qichacha, Qiming invested $1 million in Zhihu's series A, then made follow-on investments in the B, C and D rounds.
Kuaishou, Baidu and Sogou also own stakes, as does SAIF IV Mobile Apps Limited.
Innovation Works' Kai-Fu Lee and Peter Liu, and Qiming Ventures, both of which invested early and often, look like the biggest winners besides founder Zhou.
What people are saying
"Zhihu, if it ever wants to be a truly massive platform, will need to go out of the hardcore knowledge-sharing space, and become more mainstream, more entertaining, and yes, even less intellectual. But to capture that market, who better to partner with than Kuaishou, who built its business on exactly those characteristics?" —Ying-Ying Lu, co-host of Tech Buzz China.
"After separating video content into its own feed, Zhihu is now in competition with Bilibili and [ByteDance-owned] Xigua Video. Education-themed videos used to be one of the important growth drivers for the latter two apps. Now [Zhihu], the app that specialized in educational content, has joined the game." —Lan Xi (pen name), independent tech writer.
David Wertime is Protocol's executive director. David is a widely cited China expert with twenty years' experience who has served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, founded and sold a media company, and worked in senior positions within multiple newsrooms. He also hosts POLITICO's China Watcher newsletter. After four years working on international deals for top law firms in New York and Hong Kong, David co-founded Tea Leaf Nation, a website that tracked Chinese social media, later selling it to the Washington Post Company. David then served as Senior Editor for China at Foreign Policy magazine, where he launched the first Chinese-language articles in the publication's history. Thereafter, he was Entrepreneur in Residence at the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2019, David joined Protocol's parent company and in 2020, launched POLITICO's widely-read China Watcher. David is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Contemporary China, a Member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a Truman National Security fellow. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Diane and his puppy, Luna.
Sponsored Content
The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
Protocol | Policy
Far-right misinformation: Facebook's most engaging news
A new study shows that before and after the election, far-right misinformation pages drew more engagement than all other partisan news.
A new study finds that far right misinformation pulls in more engagement on Facebook than other types of partisan news.
Photo: Brett Jordan/Unsplash
March 4, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
March 3, 2021
In the months before and after the 2020 election, far-right pages that are known to spread misinformation consistently garnered more engagement on Facebook than any other partisan news, according to a New York University study published Wednesday.
The study looked at Facebook engagement for news sources across the political spectrum between Aug. 10, 2020 and Jan. 11, 2021, and found that on average, far-right pages that regularly trade in misinformation raked in 65% more engagement per follower than other far-right pages that aren't known for spreading misinformation.
<p>That finding was specific to the far right. In every other category — including far left, slightly left, center and slightly right — misinformation pages saw significantly less engagement than non-misinformation pages of the same political slant. </p><p>The research casts doubt on Facebook's efforts to limit the spread of election misinformation leading up to Election Day in November and in the aftermath of the January attack on the U.S. Capitol. Far from a barrier to engagement, the researchers wrote, "Being a consistent spreader of far-right misinformation appears to confer a significant advantage." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>The researchers analyzed 2,973 news sources that had their own Facebook pages, had at least 100 followers on average and had been graded for both quality and partisan bias by the news rating organizations NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check. They divided those pages on a spectrum from far right to far left and, within those categories, separated out pages that have been identified for spreading misinformation. Finally, they downloaded all of the public posts from all 2,973 pages to analyze their follower and engagement data over time.</p><p>Their findings provide yet another data point to counter conservative claims that they're being more aggressively censored than liberals. The researchers found that not only did far-right misinformation outperform every other ideological category, but far-right news in general also drew far more engagement per follower than any other category. Far-left news came in close behind, suggesting that the more extreme a news source's partisan slant is on Facebook, the more engagement it gets. Centrist news received by far the least engagement per follower during those months.</p><p>Engagement was particularly high for far-right news sources on Election Day and on Jan. 6, the day of the Capitol riot. "In the week of Jan. 6, for example, far-right news sources generated just over 500 interactions for every thousand followers of the page" the authors write. "Slightly-right or slightly-left news sources reached only around 150 interactions per thousand followers that week."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The findings align with other <a href="https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">analyses</a> of the top-performing posts on Facebook, which have shown far-right commentators like Dan Bongino consistently dominating in the United States.</p><p>While the study provides some firm data about how well political news sources perform, questions remain about why this is the case. The researchers can't see, for instance, how many people were shown a given post, which could contribute to the higher engagement numbers. "Further research is needed to determine to what extent Facebook algorithms feed into this trend, for example, and to conduct analysis across other popular platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok," the authors wrote. "Without greater transparency and access to data, such research questions are out of reach."</p><p>Some of the paper's authors are also behind the NYU AdObserver, a browser plug-in that enables them to analyze Facebook political ad targeting data. Shortly before the election, Facebook <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/dear-mr-zuckerberg/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">served</a> the AdObserver team with a cease-and-desist letter.</p>Facebook, for its part, seems to be increasingly interested in limiting the rampant political polarization of its platform. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was launching an experiment to <a href="https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/facebook-political-content-news-feed" target="_self">limit</a> the amount of political news in some users' news feeds. "One of the top pieces of feedback we're hearing from our community right now is that people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services," Zuckerberg said.
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
People
WhatsApp thinks business chat is the future — but it won't be easy
From privacy policy screw-ups to UI questions, can WhatsApp crack the super-app riddle?
WhatsApp Business is trying to wrap shopping around messaging. It's not always easy.
Image: WhatsApp
March 2, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
March 2, 2021
At some point, WhatsApp was always going to have to make some money. Facebook paid $21.8 billion for the company in 2014, and since then, WhatsApp has grown to more than 2 billion users in more than 180 countries. And while, yes, Facebook's acquisition was in part simply a way to neutralize a competitor, it also knows how to monetize an audience.
The trick, though, would be figuring out how to do that without putting ads into the app. Nobody at WhatsApp ever wanted to do that, including co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who reportedly left Facebook after disagreements over ads. More recently, even Mark Zuckerberg has slowed the WhatsApp ad train, with The Information reporting that ads in WhatsApp likely won't come while the company's under so much regulatory scrutiny. So: $21.8 billion, no ads. What to do?
<p>WhatsApp's best answer is business chat. In recent years the app has become a place where millions of businesses can set up shop, and billions of potential customers can browse and buy. Bakeries are taking orders through WhatsApp; airlines are doing customer support; doctors are taking on and seeing patients; people are registering for COVID-19 vaccines. "When you get outside of the U.S. and into some of the countries where WhatsApp is really popular," Will Cathcart, Facebook's head of WhatsApp, told me, "whether or not we build any [specific] tools people use it to communicate with businesses." All WhatsApp realized was that it could make things better, and maybe help everyone — including WhatsApp — make more money.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>This presents an enormous opportunity — and an enormous challenge. The opportunity: to build a super-app on the scale of WeChat, one place where users talk to their friends and go to school and order lunch and do their taxes. (For a company like Facebook that's increasingly getting into things like payment processing and cryptocurrency, a super-app is basically a perpetual money machine.) The challenge: to enable all the things businesses want without destroying the user experience or violating the privacy and safety of users. In the last few weeks, as WhatsApp has rolled out a new privacy policy designed to work better for business chat, it has discovered exactly how quickly that can go wrong. </p><p>All WhatsApp has to do is walk that careful tightrope, avoid the inherent complications that come with the "by Facebook" at the end of its official name, and become the future of shopping. Simple enough, right?</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><h3>Connecting to chat</h3><p>Business-to-consumer messaging has been growing fast for the last several years, as customers look for something better than an interminable wait on hold, and has spiked during the pandemic. The automated chatbot craze has mostly died down, but Apple and Google are both actively offering business-chat services, and Facebook Messenger remains the largest player in the space with more than 80% of businesses in one survey saying they were at least testing Messenger. Messaging is asynchronous, low effort, and happens in the apps where most people spend most of their time anyway.</p><p>WhatsApp's thinking about business chat started in 2017, head of business products Ajit Varma told me. "It was very much just looking at how people were hacking WhatsApp, the consumer app." They'd long known that businesses were using WhatsApp as a way to communicate with customers, book appointments, that sort of thing. In countries where most people used the internet exclusively on their phone, some businesses advertised their WhatsApp number instead of having a website.</p><p>But as the team dug in, they found businesses using third-party keyboards on their phones to quickly send the same information over and over. They found menu images being sent countless times, taking up valuable storage space on devices everywhere. They had hacky systems for managing schedules, and no systems for managing business hours. All that stuff would be table stakes for a business app, but didn't exist in WhatsApp because WhatsApp wasn't a business app.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>It took time for the WhatsApp team to figure out how to best help these business users. One of the product team's early ideas was a feature for setting business hours, which seemed simple enough: Let companies choose hours to be open, and let them create an auto-responder to send outside those hours. Except businesses started to say they were closed 24 hours a day, because they wanted the auto-responder to send out their catalog every time a new person said hi. </p><p>Eventually, rather than focusing on productivity or organization or loyalty, WhatsApp decided to focus on pure commerce. It built a better way to do quick replies and away messages, a catalog tool, a shopping cart feature, payment systems, a QR code scanner for connecting to a business and more. Small businesses can use the dedicated WhatsApp Business app, while larger ones use the WhatsApp Business API to add large-scale chat to their offering. </p><p>So far, it's working. The WhatsApp Business app has more than 50 million users, and thousands of large companies are set up on the API. Around 175 million people message a business every day on WhatsApp. There are 8 million business catalogs available for viewing on WhatsApp. Right now, WhatsApp charges for some of the features in the API, but could also start adding payment-processing fees and more paid features over time. The flywheel is whirring, and WhatsApp continues to invest in business tools. <br></p><p>And this is where we have to talk about the privacy update.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://www.protocol.com/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcwNDUzOC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMDU2NTgzNn0.6Ku9EMXh4f73dYTC-OgKOxfVScrEGTJAvY8gVdLy82Q/image.png?width=980" id="d3df1" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="d2c8fb8c3620264de18d0b57959519ab" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="WhatsApp Business privacy">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">WhatsApp updated its privacy policy in January. It went … badly.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: WhatsApp</small></p><h3>Terms and conditions apply<br></h3><p>In early January, WhatsApp started alerting users to a change in its terms and privacy policy. "As part of the Facebook family of companies," the new policy said, "WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings." </p><p>This, of course, had been the case since not long after the 2014 acquisition. But WhatsApp was spelling it out for people at a time of deep mistrust for Facebook. People all over the world panicked. Signal picked up tens of millions of new users in only a few days, and WhatsApp's long-held privacy promises were seriously called into question. WhatsApp seemed to be promising it wouldn't share data with Facebook, but it was giving itself permission to do so. And Facebook is not known for turning down user data. </p><p>In retrospect, Cathcart said it was mostly a failure of communication. "We remain completely committed to people's privacy," he said. "We will always have end-to-end encryption for people's personal conversations." The privacy update was meant to accomplish something the team thought would be simple: allow businesses to collect a small amount of information about their customers and store it on Facebook's servers. "We're focused on just how we deliver the message to a business," Cathcart said. "We don't collect much data on our users as is, so there's not much to hand over, but even that's not what we're doing. We're just delivering the message." He underestimated the extent to which people care about the privacy of their messages, and maybe also how little they trust Facebook now.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Since that first blowback, WhatsApp has delayed the implementation of the change, and tried to explain it more clearly. But it's still enforcing the change: On May 15, users will have to either accept the new terms or stop using WhatsApp. The company often says that chatting with a business is completely optional, but because there's no separate business version of WhatsApp, the privacy policy isn't optional.</p><p>Here Cathcart comes back to the idea that millions of people were already chatting with businesses. He's adamant that WhatsApp remains focused on doing one thing really well, and that business chat fits neatly into the product's core mission. "We're focused on situations where consumers message the business," Cathcart said, "not situations where businesses come in and say, 'Hey, I want to reach a million people with the same message.'" That's called advertising, and Facebook and Instagram are great for that. WhatsApp is more interested in facilitating one-to-one communications. He asked: "How do you make that work really well and better than the alternatives: a phone, a website, email, etc.?"</p><h3>Simple is hard</h3><p>One unique feature of WhatsApp is that it's often the first app a new smartphone user will download. Most of the service's growth comes from people getting online for the first time, who don't have the expertise to grok super complicated apps. One reason WhatsApp works so well is that it doesn't try to do too much. Even the idea of adding a Shopping tab to WhatsApp felt too complicated. "We don't want our users to feel dumb," Varma said. "We don't want to tell them what they should be using our app for."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>Varma's team, then, is trying to give businesses more tools without compromising the simplicity of WhatsApp. "We're still thinking about, like, how do we convince you, who has never made an online purchase before?" Varma said. "Building a fancy carousel that animates and has AR lenses and stuff is definitely not the core of what we're trying to accomplish." Same goes for businesses themselves, Cathcart said. "I think it's important that on the business side, you build tools that meet the business where they are, and work to their workflows."</p><p>Going forward, Varma said, the trick will be to make the tech more complex and powerful without making the experience more complicated. He's thinking about how multi-user shopping might work, for instance — so a family could order dinner collaboratively in a chat — and how to build more automated tools into the system. He sees a hybrid of chatbot and human as the future. "Some questions you can answer with a bot and be close to instantaneous," he said. Users should be able to get their receipt and tracking info automatically, for instance, but troubleshooting or repair questions might require human intervention.</p>The plan gets more ambitious over time. "In 10 years," Varma said, "hopefully we have a personal assistant that's doing everything for you. It knows who you are and what you like." A lot of companies share that dream, of course. And to some extent the odds are stacked against WhatsApp. The WhatsApp that billions of users love is a dead-simple messaging app that cares about users' privacy. Is it even possible to be those things, <p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><em>and </em>the conversational future of clothes shopping, food delivery, doctor appointments and movie tickets? That's the $21.8 billion question.
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
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