FB brings F8 to San Jose.
Tech company expected to tout chatbots for Messenger, VR and updates for apps
When Facebook first opened up its social network to app developers in 2007, the site only had 20 million users, the “like” button didn’t even exist and the tech firm wasn’t a publicly traded company.
Today, Menlo Park-based Facebook has grown to 1.9 billion users and is making big bets on messaging, virtual reality, chatbots and even internetbeaming drones.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, more than 4,000 people from around the world are expected to attend the company’s developer conference in San Jose. Facebook CEO Mark Zucker-
berg outlined the company’s 10-year road map at last year’s F8 conference and is expected to deliver the keynote address again.
“You’ll hear a lot from us about how we are innovating on that road map, so stay tuned,” said Desiree Motamedi, Facebook’s head of developer product marketing, in an email.
Attendees will also learn more about the Facebook developer platform, virtual reality and the latest update on the apps that the tech firm owns. Facebook owns Instagram, WhatsApp and virtual reality company Oculus.
In 2016, Facebook executives announced the company would start supporting chatbots in its messaging app to help businesses converse directly with their customers through texts. Powered by artificial intelligence, chatbots are computer software programs that mimic human conversations.
Since then, businesses have built more than 30,000 bots on Messenger, which has 1.2 billion active users every month, according to Facebook. Through these bots, users can receive weather updates, shop, confirm hotel reservations and more.
Building off that work, Facebook is expected to launch group chatbots for Messenger at F8 to help users keep up with realtime events such as sports or deliveries, TechCrunch reported, citing unnamed sources.
Sports fans in a Messenger group could keep up with a game by adding a bot to their messaging thread.
More than 50 sessions are scheduled at the event.
That includes talks on bots, the Facebook in-app camera, virtual reality, gaming, privacy and other topics.
The name of the conference, which started in 2007, comes from Facebook’s eight-hour “hackathons” in the tech firm’s early days.
For the first time, F8 will be held at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose instead of Fort Mason in San Francisco.
Apple also will move its developer conference to San Jose this year, a return for the Cupertino-based company’s conference to a city in the heart of Silicon Valley.
These conferences help enhance San Jose’s brand as a place where tech leaders and others from around the world gather, said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo.
F8 could have an estimated economic impact of about $2.2 million on San Jose, according to Team San Jose, which manages the convention center. That figure, though, was based on an estimate of 3,000 attendees.
More than 4,000 developers from Brazil, France, India, Japan, Mexico and other countries are attending F8 this year, an increase from the more than 2,600 developers who attended in 2016.
“San Francisco is a great city,” Liccardo said. “But what San Jose offers is an opportunity for scale, whether it’s companies that want to grow without constraint or whether its major conventions that are looking for the ability to have access to major city infrastructure.”