Facebook will buy REI’s new and unused Bellevue campus for nearly $368 million, the social media giant said on Monday.

The move further consolidates Facebook’s domain in the upscale Spring District east of Interstate 405 in Bellevue, The Seattle Times reported. Before the acquisition of the 400,000-square-foot (37,161-square-meter) REI offices, Facebook was already moving to occupy nearly 850,000 square feet (78,968 square meters) in three Spring District buildings.

The company, which opened its first Puget Sound office in 2010 with three engineers, now employs more than 5,000 workers in dozens of locations in Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond. That places it alongside Google as the area’s largest out-of-town tech employers. The Seattle area is home to Facebook’s second-largest office footprint, after its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

“Our growth over the last decade is a testament to the thriving community and immense talent pool that has welcomed us with open arms,” said Nick Raby, Facebook’s director of North American real estate, in a statement. “This purchase doubles downs on our investment in Bellevue and our commitment to the Pacific Northwest.”

The deal signals there is “no single approach” for white-collar employers envisioning the future of office space as work-from-home regimes stretch into their seventh month, said Greg Johnson, the CEO of Spring District developer Wright Runstad & Company.

REI decided to sell its campus after the coronavirus pandemic hammered sales, leading the outdoor equipment retailer to conclude that it couldn’t afford not to sell the space. The company’s work-from-home program also proved to be surprisingly successful, said Ben Steele, REI’s chief customer officer. REI will rely more heavily on remote work and smaller satellite offices.

Source: AP

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Facebook is launching Shops, a service that will allow businesses to display and sell products on the world's largest social network's platforms, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday.

The move to build up e-commerce offerings follows Facebook's launch last year of limited shopping options on photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp. Company leaders wager making the platforms more business-friendly will generate fresh ad revenue, even as user growth slows.

Facebook Shops will tie at least some of those efforts together, enabling businesses to set up a single online store accessible via both Facebook and Instagram. A checkout feature will enable in-app purchases, while a more deeply integrated messaging feature will allow customers to chat with businesses through WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram Direct.

Zuckerberg also said the world's largest social network would be working more closely on product integrations with Shopify and seven other online commerce platforms (BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Channel Advisor, CedCommerce, Cafe24, Tienda Nube, and Feedonomics) going forward. 

As with Facebook's other e-commerce features, Shops will be free for businesses to access with the expectation it will boost consumer engagement and ad sales.

"This is the biggest step that we've taken yet to enable commerce across our family of apps," Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said.

The primary focus of Facebook Shops is to make it easy for businesses to have online storefronts to survive during the crisis and ride the online shopping trend into the future, according to Zuckerberg.

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Facebook is also working on free tools including augmented reality to let shoppers see how they will look in outfits, cosmetics or other items for sale, according to Zuckerberg.

"I hope that we can at least help build some of the infrastructures that businesses need not only in this moment but going forward as well," Zuckerberg said.

"Because even when this period and the lockdowns pass... we're going to continue living more of our lives, and doing business, online."

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The owner of TikTok has chosen Oracle over Microsoft as the American tech partner that could help keep the popular video-sharing app running in the U.S., according to a source familiar with the deal who was not authorized to speak publicly about it.

Microsoft announced Sunday that its bid to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations was rejected, removing the tech giant from the running a week before President Donald Trump promises to follow through with a plan to ban the Chinese-owned app in the U.S. over spying concerns.

TikTok and the White House declined to comment Sunday. Oracle didn’t return a request for comment but has previously declined comment.

Walmart, which had planned to partner with Microsoft on the acquisition, said Sunday it “continues to have an interest in a TikTok investment” and is talking about it with ByteDance and other parties.

The Trump administration has threatened to ban TikTok by Sept. 20 and ordered ByteDance to sell its U.S. business, claiming national-security risks due to its Chinese ownership. The government worries about user data being funneled to Chinese authorities. TikTok denies it is a national-security risk and is suing to stop the administration from the threatened ban.

Microsoft said in a Sunday statement that ByteDance “let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft.”

Microsoft added it was “confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users while protecting national security interests.” The company said it “would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety, and combating disinformation.”

TikTok, which says it has 100 million U.S. users and about 700 million globally, is known for its fun, goofy videos of dancing, lip-syncing, pranks and jokes. It’s recently become home to more political content such as the comedian Sarah Cooper, who drew a large audience by lip-syncing Trump’s own often-disjointed statements from public appearances.

TikTok denies that it has shared user data with the Chinese government or that it would do so if asked. The company says it has not censored videos at the request of Chinese authorities and insists it is not a national-security threat.

TikTok has sued to stop the ban, but not the sale order. The negotiations have been complicated by several factors, including Trump’s repeated demands that the U.S. government should get a “cut” of any deal, a stipulation and role for the president that experts say is unprecedented.

In addition, the Chinese government in late August unveiled new regulations that restrict exports of technology, likely including the artificial intelligence system TikTok uses to choose which videos to spool up to its users. That means ByteDance would have to obtain a license from China to export such technology to a foreign company.

The deal had come together rapidly after the administration ramped up its threats against TikTok this summer, despite TikTok’s efforts to put distance between its app and its Chinese ownership. It installed former Disney executive Kevin Mayer as its American CEO, but he resigned in August after just a few months on the job, saying the “political environment has sharply changed.”

Both Microsoft and Oracle are known more for their business software offerings than for those intended for consumers.

Oracle primarily makes database software. It competes with tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon that provide cloud services as well as business-software specialists like Salesforce.

Thill suggested that TikTok competitors like Facebook and Snapchat should be “cheering on Oracle” as a buyer because Oracle wouldn’t “add a lot of value to the app.”

The president said on Aug. 18 that Oracle was “a great company” that “could handle” buying TikTok. He declined to state his preference between Oracle and Microsoft as buyers.

source: AP

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Influencers, brace yourselves: Instagram may be considering charging a fee to add links to photo captions, a patent application suggests. Mike Murphy discovered it as part of his (fascinating!) weekly roundup of tech patents over at Protocol.

The patent application, which Instagram parent company Facebook first submitted back in 2016, shows a pop-up appearing when the user adds a URL to a caption, asking if the user wants to pay $2 to make the link live.

The patent application (titled “adding paid links to media captions in a social networking system”) describes how the system would work: “If the online system detects the text content of the caption includes a string of link text identifying an address, the online system prompts the posting user to pay a fee in exchange for generating a link.”

This, of course, has long been one of the biggest complaints about Instagram: that if you want to include a link to a story, product, or anything else in your post you can’t add URLs to captions of photos. Most people go the “link in bio” route and verified Insta users can add links to Stories. The question here will be whether Instagram influencers, brands, and other users will be willing to pay a per-link fee. But it seems like a no-brainer to generate revenue for Instagram if this goes into effect.

However, as with any patent, it’s important to note that companies apply for patents all the time for products and services that never come to fruition, so there’s no telling if or when this feature might actually happen. Maybe don’t splurge on that new selfie stick just yet.

source: TheVerge

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