Friday December 6, 2024

Former Facebook engineer picks up $15M for AI platform Spell

In 2016, Serkan Piantino packed up his desk at Facebook with hopes to move on to something new. The former Director of Engineering for Faceboook AI Research had every intention to keep working on AI, but quickly realized a huge issue. Unless you’re under the umbrella of one of these big tech companies like Facebook, […]

Workplace by Facebook launches Safety Check for business users

Workplace, Facebook’s communications platform for enterprises, is launching its own version of Safety Check today. Safety Check itself is obviously not a new feature. Indeed, Facebook has now activated this tool, which lets you report your status during a crisis, thousands of times. For business users, though, Facebook is now offering a number of new […]

Facebook poaches leaders of Refdash interview prep to work on Jobs

Facebook just snatched some talent to fuel its invasion of LinkedIn’s turf. A source tells TechCrunch that members of coding interview practice startup Refdash including at least some of its executives have been hired by Facebook. The social network confirmed to TechCrunch that members of Refdash’s leadership team are joining to work on Facebook’s Jobs […]

Facebook acquires Redkix to enhance communications on Workplace by Facebook

Facebook had a rough day yesterday when its stock plunged after a poor earnings report. What better way to pick yourself up and dust yourself off than to buy a little something for yourself. Today the company announced it has acquired Redkix, a startup that provides tools to communicate more effectively by combining email with […]

How Facebook configures its millions of servers every day

When you’re a company the size of Facebook with more than two billion users on millions of servers, running thousands of configuration changes every day involving trillions of configuration checks, as you can imagine, configuration is kind of a big deal. As with most things with Facebook, they face scale problems few companies have to […]

Facebook is using machine learning to self-tune its myriad services

Regardless of what you may think of Facebook as a platform, they run a massive operation, and when you reach their level of scale you have to get more creative in how you handle every aspect of your computing environment. Engineers quickly reach the limits of human ability to track information, to the point that […]

SharpestMinds wants to help startups find AI talent before Google and Facebook snatch them

 Google and other tech giants often have huge recruiting efforts that can target students — but startups might not have those kinds of resources to find or grab them before they head off to those huge companies. The biggest tech companies in the world can offer a lot of resources and bigger compensation packages, but […]

IBM led on patents in 2017, Facebook broke into top 50 for the first time

 Patents may sometimes get a bad rap for how they are abused (and misused) by some companies for commercial gain, but they also remain a marker of how a tech company is progressing with its R&D and pushing ahead on innovation. For one measure of that advance, today, IFI Claims, the patent analytics firm, published […]

Facebook open sources Open/R distributed networking software

 Facebook is no stranger when it comes to open sourcing its computing knowledge. Over the years, it has consistently created software and hardware internally, then transferred that wisdom to the open source community to let them have it. Today, it announced it was open sourcing its modular network routing software called Open/R, as the tradition […]

Facebook, Google and Twitter briefing about Russian involvement

Facebook, Google and Twitter are expected to appear in a November 1st briefing about Russian involvement on their platforms. According to reports, some Russian-backed Pages sent users Messenger invitations and posted within the service nearly every day. Facebook reported last month that Russian-linked accounts purchased $150,000 in political ads from June 2015 to May 2017 […]