Facebook will stop at nothing short of world domination
How do you keep growing when you're already the world's largest social network? Fast food may provide the answer.
Facebook has more in common with McDonald's than you might think.
Both are at the top of their respective fields, so widely used and recognized that they're the icons of the industries they dominate. It took the fast-food chain eight years to serve up a billion burgers; it took the social network eight years to sign up a billion people.
Now it seems they've taken similar strategies to get more attention and win over more customers.
McDonald's looked beyond its staples of Big Macs and fries and added the Filet-O-Fish, Chicken McNugget and Egg McMuffin to its menu over a few decades, along with salads and gourmet coffees.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg is pushing his company beyond its bread and butter of the profile, photos and News Feed, all as part of a plan to connect even more people around the world. Instead of McNuggets and coffee, Facebook has added photo sharing, virtual reality goggles and a messaging app to broaden its menu.
But is it enough?
Nathan Eagle, head of a connectivity startup called Jana, said the challenge for Facebook is the sheer scale of its user base. "It gets harder and harder the next billion you have," he said.
There aren't that many companies in the world that think about their next billion customers. Even fewer of them are tech companies. Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce giant counts its Prime-subscription memberships in the millions. Apple's seemingly prolific iTunes Store had 800 million accounts on file last year.
Then there's Facebook. About half the world's online population uses its service each month. That's more than 1.5 billion people, or one out of five people on Earth.
What is it going to take to get the other nearly 6 billion people onto its service? It's going to have be a whole lot more appetizing.
The Quarter Pounder
To keep current customers happy, Facebook expanded its app catalog. Two years ago, it launched Paper, an app that focuses on displaying large photos and news articles from people's posts. The design of Paper inspired other efforts, including partnering with news services (such as CNET parent CBS Interactive) to publish articles on its site.
Not everything has worked. Initiatives like Facebook's Creative Labs, which inspired employees to create experimental apps like the ephemeral messaging app Slingshot or the group-messenger app Rooms, attracted so few people that the company quietly shut them down this year.
Meanwhile, apps that expand on Facebook's core features, like its Moments photo-sharing app and Messenger service, have won over huge audiences. More than 700 million people log into Messenger each month.
Breakfast all day
Sometimes competitors have a better idea and that's OK.
For McDonald's, it was selling breakfast all day. At Facebook, it is WhatsApp, Instagram and LiveRail, all startups whose services -- messaging, photo sharing and advertising -- were different from what Facebook was doing on its own. Since it was founded in 2004, Facebook has paid out about $4 billion to buy up competitors, not including the $19 billion it cost to acquire WhatsApp.
Zuckerberg keeps showing that he and his team aren't afraid of ticking off investors by spending big. The company already warned Wall Street it's going to keep putting down cash to get whatever services, tech or talent it wants. And it's been pretty clear that Facebook shareholders shouldn't expect a return on those investments anytime soon.
Make way for McPizza
Sometimes you have to try something so outlandish that people say "whaa?"
Facebook turned heads when it bought Oculus VR, the startup that makes goggles that place a screen in front of your eyes. The images displayed make you feel like you're in a computer-generated world. You can watch a movie, stand on the sidelines of a football game or chat with a friend on the surface of Neptune. Anything's possible with virtual reality.
What does that all have to do with Facebook? That was the question when the company paid $2 billion last year for the then-2-year-old startup. Since then, Zuckerberg has talked about how he believes Oculus will change the way we use computers, transforming education, entertainment and gaming along the way. Facebook and Oculus, he said, are going to show you how.
"With Oculus," he said in an October 2014 conference call, "we're making a long-term bet on the future of computing."
But that bet isn't a guarantee. Eventually, we'll learn whether it's more of a McLobster, which tops many lists of famous McDonald's flubs, or a McGriddle, which helped dramatically expand the company's sales after its launch more than a decade ago.
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Here are the reasons why so many hoverboards are catching fire
Buying a self-balancing scooter? You might want to think twice.
"Back to the Future Part II" got it partly right. In the year 2015, the hoverboard is a real form of transportation that lets trendy kids get into trouble while effortlessly zipping along the sidewalk. There are a handful of important differences, though. These self-balancing scooters don't actually hover like the ones in the movie.
Also, they could potentially catch on fire and burn your house down.
Hoverboards have become one of the hottest news stories this holiday season -- and not just because they're selling like mad. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, there have now been 12 incidents in the United States where the lithium ion batteries in these hoverboards reportedly caught fire -- destroying bedrooms and even entire homes.
The fires have started in all sorts of different circumstances, too. According to owners and witnesses, some of the hoverboards exploded while charging, others while riding and one while it was simply sitting near a kiosk in a Washington shopping mall. (There have been several other hoverboard fires reported in the UK, and at least one in Hong Kong.)
Here's the really scary part: there's no single reason why these hoverboards are exploding, and there's no sure-fire way to avoid potential catastrophe if you want to buy one yourself. There's no particular brand of hoverboard to avoid -- they all seem to come from thousands of interchangeable factories in China -- or any label on the box that guarantees a product won't explode. And much of the advice we've seen issued by local fire departments and government agencies isn't likely to help.
For instance, officials have been warning that you should only use the charger that comes in the box. That sounds like common sense -- until you realize that these hoverboards tend to use a plug you won't find on any other type of device. Meaning you don't really choose which type of charger you can use, so it's pretty unlikely that any of these fires occurred due to someone mistaking a laptop charger for a hoverboard one.
Similarly, many officials now warn against overcharging hoverboards -- but when was the last time you had to think about overcharging a gadget? With modern laptops and smartphones, you simply plug them in and leave them there, trusting that they'll automatically shut off the flow of electricity when they're done.
While the US Consumer Product Safety Commission is now working nonstop to figure out the actual root causes of these incidents, they don't have the answers yet. "We want to be able to deliver for the public, but we hope they'll be able to appreciate that what's going on right now is a very thorough science-based investigation," said CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson.
For now, your best bet might simply be not to buy a hoverboard at all. The US airline industry has already decided not to take any chances: American, Alaska, Delta, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Southwest and United Airlines have banned hoverboards on passenger flights, and the US Postal Service has stopped shipping hoverboards by air as well. Amazon and Target both temporarily suspended sales, and Overstock.com has stopped selling hoverboards at all.
But in case you're curious, here's what we know about hoverboard fires so far.
The science
The science behind hoverboard fires is actually pretty simple, and fairly well understood. Much like your laptop, tablet or phone, these hoverboards use lithium ion battery packs for their power -- and it just so happens that the liquid swimming around inside most lithium ion batteries is highly flammable. If the battery short-circuits -- say, by puncturing the incredibly thin sheet of plastic separating the positive and negative sides of the battery -- the liquid electrolyte can heat up so quickly that the battery explodes.
You don't necessarily need to stab a lithium ion battery to set it on fire: a defective battery might have tiny sharp metal particles inside that could puncture the separator all on its own. "When this happens, especially when the batteries are charged, a lot of heat is generated inside the cells and this leads to electrolyte boiling, the rupture of the cell casing, and then a significant fire," Carnegie Mellon University materials science professor Jay Whitacre told Wired. You can see what a lithium ion battery fire looks like in our Droid Turbo 2 torture test video:
It shouldn't be a revelation that lithium ion batteries are volatile, because fires like these aren't exactly new. We've been living with potentially deadly explosions in our pockets and laptop bags for years. In 2004, a spike in the number of cell phone battery explosions prompted this CNET report, and Dell recalled millions of laptop batteries in 2006 after just six incidents of fire. More recently, Boeing had to ground the 787 Dreamliner airplane until it could find a way to keep its lithium ion batteries from overheating.
Safety standards, or the lack thereof
If lithium ion batteries are so volatile, why are we still using them today? The traditional argument is that the energy density of lithium ion batteries is significantly higher than less flammable cells. (In other words, a smaller, lighter battery can last longer on a charge.)
Another reason: The consumer electronics industry has gotten much better about safety standards, to the point where most of us don't think twice about leaving a phone connected to a charger. "We said to the companies, you need to come together, create a voluntary organization and set a safety standard," says the CPSC's Wolfson, recalling how we went from big battery scares and recalls in the mid-2000s to the relatively safe laptops and phones we have today.
Many modern batteries incorporate all kinds of safety measures, such as emergency vents, and many products filled with lithium ion batteries have to endure a barrage of drop tests, crush tests and electrical stress tests before they can pass.
But hoverboards are brand-new. "It's a product without a safety standard," says Wolfson.
Sean Kane, a longtime product safety researcher, says cases like the hoverboard are precisely why his nonprofit organization The Safety Institute is advocating for more general categories of safety standards like "computers" and "personal mobility devices" instead of the specific ones that exist today.
There are existing standards for motorized scooters and toys, says Kane, but the hoverboard just doesn't fit. "What you have is a product coming in here where no one knows which safety standards are applicable to the product."
For now, retailers like Amazon and Target are making sure individual components of these hoverboards -- namely the batteries and the chargers -- have been certified for safety. (Amazon is currently asking that all hoverboard sellers provide proof they comply with UN 38.3, UL 1642 and UL 60950-1, specifically.)
But before you breathe a sigh of relief, you should probably know that while batteries and chargers can be certified individually, it doesn't mean those hoverboards have been certified as a whole. Until those parts have actually been tested together, it's more of a legal cover-your-ass measure for the manufacturers and retailers than anything else.
And you might not be able to find a hoverboard that's been tested in its entirety by a reputable independent firm like Underwriters Laboratories (UL) even if you looked hard. Swagway, one of the more popular brands, claims its entire hoverboard is UL-certified because it has a UL-certified battery and a UL-certified charger inside, but that's not accurate. "There are presently no UL-certified hoverboards," says UL consumer safety director John Drengenberg. (Incidentally, Swagway is now facing a lawsuit from when one of its hoverboards caught fire.)
Besides, there's another problem with certifying batteries instead of the hoverboards themselves. There's no easy way to tell what kind of battery is inside a hoverboard -- or if it's a counterfeit.
Supply and demand
In 2004 when an increased number of cell phone batteries were bursting, many blamed cheap counterfeits made in China -- batteries produced with far less stringent standards than phone manufacturers might have wanted.
That's a popular theory when it comes to the hoverboard fires, too. "There are some factories right now that will say they use Samsung batteries, but don't," a sales manager for Chinese hoverboard manufacturer CHIC told Quartz. "They wrap a piece of paper around the battery that says 'Samsung' when it's not Samsung."
But unlike cell phones, it's not like we have known, reputable hoverboard manufacturers that merely got a bad batch of batteries to go with their own carefully designed proprietary components. Even the top hoverboard brands -- Phunkeeduck, IO Hawk, Swagway -- are ones you've probably never heard of, ones that sprang up out of nowhere to take advantage of the hoverboard craze.
And those companies are merely distributors for a sprawling array of factories in China that supply components to one another practically interchangeably.
That's not a reflection on the quality of Chinese manufacturing in general, by the way. Practically every high-quality Apple product comes off a Chinese assembly line, not to mention those of Lenovo, a Chinese company that's one of the top computer vendors worldwide. But China has also become famous as a place where tiny factories can pile onto a hot new idea like the selfie stick or the miniature R/C helicopter, churning out copycats in record time.
By the time the hoverboard fad took off in the United States, there were already too many Chinese companies building hoverboards to tell who came up with the idea first. Practically every hoverboard you see is a counterfeit, in that sense.
"Right now there are thousands of workshops making identical hoverboards in China, and the only obvious differentiator is the costs," says Jay Sung, CEO of popular electric-scooter company EcoReco. And since there are so many different ways these Chinese companies could have cut costs among the different components they trade with one another and piece together to form the final product you see, it's hard to narrow down the actual point of failure.
So far, some reports have blamed the batteries, others the cables, but we don't know for sure. The UK divisions of retailers Amazon and Costco are specifically telling customers to destroy charging cablesthat have plugs that weren't built to UK safety standards. (Costco is providing replacement cables, while Amazon is offering full refunds.)
Another possible culprit is the cut-off switch, a safety feature that keeps an electronic device from overcharging, which the UK's National Trading Standards consumer protection agency says can often fail in these hoverboards. EcoReco's Sung suggested that to save costs, some hoverboard manufacturers might not even include a cut-off switch to begin with. That's clearly not the issue everywhere, though: Mashable recently tore down a Swagway hoverboard that appeared to have a cut-off switch installed.
What happens now
In the UK, the government is already cracking down on hoverboards. Not only is it illegal to ride one on public roads or walkways, but the UK National Trading Standards body has now seized and reportedly destroyed 32,000 hoverboards -- the vast majority of the 38,800 devices that the organization has been tracking since it started investigating the devices in October.
In the United States, we're waiting to hear what the Consumer Product Safety Commission uncovers. It could be that the organization finds a specific batch of defective batteries or other defective component and issues a recall. Perhaps the CPSC will push for more voluntary standards like the ones that made laptops and phones safer today.
Or it could be that the CPSC pushes to ban hoverboards altogether. It wouldn't be the first time a popular toy was deemed too unsafe to sell. There are good reasons that lawn darts and magnetic Buckyballs, both popular toys, were banned. (Fires aren't the only reason that hoverboards are dangerous. The CPSC has received "dozens" of reports of injuries from falls from US hospital emergency rooms.)
Perhaps next time, we could reserve the name "hoverboard" for a gadget that actually floats above the ground.
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