Technology

Facebook picked election evening in the U.S. to releasea major report on its role in Myanmar, where it is widely accused of failing to prevent its social network from being used to incite genocide.

The situation is arguably more severe that alleged Russia-backed attempts to meddle with the 2016 U.S. election —people have died in Myanmar as Facebook has been used to spread hate speech against its minority Muslim population for years. Yet, Facebook pushed out this independent investigation — available in full here — just hours before the mid-terms, timing that could seeits findings buried as the U.S. political news cycle takes over.

It shouldn&t. There are some serious issues here that need exploring, and not just in the context of Myanmar.

AUN Fact-Finding Mission previously concluded that social media has played a &determining role& in the crisis, with Facebook the chief actor, but there areconcerns to answer for in other emerging markets where, like Myanmar, it has happily siphoned advertising money and basked in user growth without taking full responsibility for its position as the dominant internet platform.

In Myanmarcase, Facebook admitted its failings in a blog post that announced the results of the BSR reportinto &a human rights impact assessment& of Facebookpresence in Myanmar, where it is used by nearly 20 million people.

&The report concludes that, prior to this year, we weren&t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence. We agree that we can and should do more,& Facebook wrote.

Thata positive if not obvious startbut Facebook has been criticized for failing to fully invest in change in Myanmar.

Young men browse their Facebook wall on their smartphones as they sit in a street in Yangon on August 20, 2015. Facebook remains the dominant social network for US Internet users, while Twitter has failed to keep apace with rivals like Instagram and Pinterest, a study showed. AFP PHOTO / Nicolas ASFOURI (Photo credit should read NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images)

Still no local office

The company confirmed to TechCrunch it doesn&t plan to open a local office, an obviousstep that would show it is treating Myanmar seriously.

It believes a local presence would put its staff at risk. The BSR report itself concludes that there would be &both advantages and disadvantages& to a Facebook presence in Myanmarsince &the existence of local Facebook staff may increase government leverage over content restrictions anddata requests by allowing them to threaten seizure of FacebookIT equipment or data or placeFacebook staff at safety risk.&

Facebook has been ok taking that risk in a market like Thailand — where it has sat back and watched users routinely jailed for Facebook activity — while its service has beenweaponized by controversial Philippines& President Duterte, and it has come under pressure in Indonesia to censor content and pay taxes, to name but three examples.

&How many companies have 20 million users in one country but don&t have asingle employee, itabsurd.& JesPetersen — CEO of accelerator firm Phandeeyar, which is part of a civic advisory group to Facebook in Myanmar — told TechCrunch. &An office would go a long way to building relationships with stakeholders.&

Instead, Facebook is building a remote team for Myanmar — with five open vacancieson its careers page.

&Earlier this year, we established a dedicated team across product, engineering, and policy to work on issues specific to Myanmar, and said that we plan to grow our team of native Myanmar language speakers reviewing content to at least 100 by the end of 2018,& it said in its blog post.

However, that push has yet to kick in, according to the report, which pulled two notable quotes from Myanmar-based &stakeholders& interviewed as part of the research. Onenoted that FacebookMyanmar-focused content checkers &need to live and breathe Myanmar and build relationships with a wide range oforganizations across Myanmar, not just the usual suspects.&

While another remarked that &at times it feels as if Facebookhas outsourced the job to us, but we simply don&t have the resources to do it. We have a strong desireto be collaborative, but not to be relied upon.&

With both complaints, it is hard to see how a remote staff base can adequately address those concerns.

Asia Pacific has become a key growth market for Facebook as user numbers have stalled in the U.S. and Europe

Taking action

Without committing to an office, Facebook has taken significant steps to set an example. It banned 20 individuals and organizations — including armed forces chiefSenior General Min Aung Hlaing andmilitary-owned TV network Myawady — in August after finding evidence that they &committed or enabled serious human rights abuses in the country. Then in October, it booted13 Pages and 10 accounts — with a cumulative following over one million — after a New York Times investigation found they had pedaled government propaganda.

The social network also claims that it is seeing positive change with its efforts to root out content. During Q2, it said it &proactively identified& 63 percent of content that was removed for hate speech in Myanmar, up from 52 percent and 13 percent in the previous quarters.

Petersen, however, suggested that Facebook has been selective with the information that it has shared. He said the Myanmar-based group is still waiting on a request for further clarification on a wider selection figures, while Facebook has been less communicative with the group in recent months.

Facebook credits both its hiring of staff and investment in technology for the progress on content, however it remains unclear how those two factors break down. For one thing, the company has been guilty of over-emphasizing the role its AI-based tech plays in Myanmar.

A previous claim from CEO Mark Zuckerberg that its &systems& prevent hate speech from being sent was roundly rejected by the Phandeeyar-backed group which helped Facebook to identify hate speech on Facebook and Messenger. In response to a public apology from Zuckerberg, the group expressed its frustration that Facebook does &nowhere near enough to ensure that Myanmar users are provided with the same standards of care as users in the U.S. or Europe.&

One area of tech where Facebook is hoping to make a tangible impact is the adoption of Unicode, which is yet to happen widely in the country. More than 90 percent of phones in Myanmar use Zawgyi, but Facebook is dropping support for the standard with the goal of making its safety, reporting and other resources readable — and therefore usable — to all users. It is also improving font converters for those stuck on Zawgyi, it said.

In addition, Facebook said it is working on a digital literacy pilot withMyanmar Book Aid Preservation Foundation and it has partnered with &independent publishers in Myanmar to help build capacity and resources in their online newsrooms.&

Myanmarnext election is scheduled for 2020 so the company really does need to get its house in order. Petersen, thePhandeeyar CEO, is concerned at what may happen if progress isn&t made.

&The report does include some good recommendations butthis is what everyone told them three years ago. Also, it doesn&t touch on the fact that therebeen a systematic failure on the part of Facebook to address those issues, and that hasn&t changed,& he said. &Itestablishes an assumption that they&ve engaged with Myanmar strongly before, but they haven&t. Only in the most cursory way.

&Therean absence of real action from Facebook so far and arisk they&ll continue to not really care at all — and what will happen if they continue to not care&

A Rohingya ethnic minority man looking facebook at his cell phone at a temporary makeshift camp after crossing over from Myanmar into the Bangladesh side of the border, near CoxBazarPalangkhali, Friday, Sept. 8, 2017. Tens of thousands more people have crossed by boat and on foot into Bangladesh in the last two weeks as they flee violence in western Myanmar. (Photo by Ahmed Salahuddin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Great responsibility

In particular, Petersen and the only members of the Myanmar-based civic group want the company to look at more localized development features for Facebook products. In the same way that every part of the social network is optimized for engagement and user interaction, so they hope it could tweak its service with the ultimate goal of improving the way it is used in Myanmar.

While Petersenask is likely to fall on deaf ears, the fact remains that Facebookfailure to be locally aware — both in terms of a team presence and localized product tweaks — are weaknesses that have caused it issues across a number of emerging markets.

Whether that bedeaths following fake news on WhatsAppin India, hate speech in Sri Lanka, or the issues in Myanmar, it is high time that Facebook took responsibility and developed a truly local strategy rather than generic policies designed in Menlo Park for global usage.

Zuckerberg said earlier this year that &it would be near-sighted to focus on short-term revenue over people.& Even in a ‘poor& last quarter, Facebook recorded a $5 billion profit and a logicalextension of Zuckerberg‘people-first& thesis would be a genuine investment in markets where its presence is controversial.

Until we see that happen, Facebook isn&t fully committed to living up to its responsibility.

Every day, there are around 650,000 emergency service callouts via 911 for medical, police and fire assistance in the US; and by their nature these are some of the most urgent communications that we will ever make.

But ironically for the age of smartphones, connected things and the internet, these 911 calls are also some of the most antiquated — with a typical emergency response centre still relying on the humans making the calls to tell them the most basic of information about their predicaments before anything can be actioned.

Now a new generation of startups has been emerging to tackle that gap to make emergency responses more accurate and faster; and one of them today is announcing a significant round of funding on the back of very strong growth. RapidSOS, a New York-based startup that helps increase the funnel of information that is transmitted to emergency services alongside a call for help, has raised another $30 million in funding — money that itgoing to use to continue enhancing its product, and also to start pushing into more international markets.

The opportunity internationally is greater than the US alone: while the US sees 240 million calls per year to 911 numbers, globally the figure is 2 billion.

The funding — which comes only about six months after RapidSOS&slast round of $16 million — is being led by Playground Global, the VC firm and &startup studio& co-founded by Android co-creator Andy Rubin.

Others in the round include a mix of previous and new investors (and a lot of illustrious names):Highland Capital Partners, M12 (MicrosoftVenture Fund), Two Sigma Ventures, Forte Ventures, The Westly Group, CSAA IG, three former FCC Chairmen and Ralph de la Vega, the former AT-T Vice Chairman and CEO of AT-T Business Solutions and International. It brings the total raised by the startup to $65 million.

Michael Martin, CEO and co-founder of RapidSOS, said the startup is not disclosing its valuation, but he did point me to the companystunning growth over the last year:

&We went from 10,000 users to 250 million,& he said, noting the range of agencies and other partners the startup is integrating with to provide more detailed information across the emergency services ecosystem.

Partners on the two sides of RapidSOSmarketplace include, on one side,Apple, Google, Uber, car companies and others making connected devices and apps — which integrate RapidSOStechnology to provide 911 response centres with more data such as a userlocation and diagnostic details that can help determine what kind of response is needed, where to go, and so on. And on the other side, you have the emergency services that need that information to do their work and organise assistance.

RapidSOS offers a few different products to the market. Its most popular, the RapidSOS NG911 Clearinghouse, works either with a response centreexisting software, or by way of a web application. This product now covers some 180 million people in the US in terms of the number of people touched by those different emergency response services, the company says.

The RapidSOS API, meanwhile, is used by a number of device makers and apps to be able to channel that information into the RapidSOS system, so that when a response centre is using RapidSOS and a caller is using a device or app with the API integrated with it, that information gets conveyed.

The startup also offers a rescue and recovery app called Haven, and found its profile getting a huge boost after Haven went viral in the wake of asuccession of natural disasters in the US.

The company generates revenues in different ways across that range of services. On mobile, the service is free to consumers, with licensing for the integrations paid for by large tech partners like Apple, Google, etc. In the areas of safety and security (including integrations withhome security, digital health, medical alert, personal emergency response (PERS), and vehicle crash response providers), RapidSOS is &typically bundled in with the service offering,& Martin said.

Martin — who co-founded the company with now-CTO Nicholas Horelik (respectively Harvard and MIT grads) after Martin said he was mugged in New York City — said that he sees a big opportunity for RapidSOS, and indeed emergency services in general, once we start to join up the dots better between the trove of data that we can now pick up with connected objects, and conveying whatimportant in that trove in order to make emergency calls more effective.

&Most emergency communication today uses infrastructure established between the 1960s and the 1980s, and it means that if you need 911 but can&t have a conversation you are in trouble. 911 doesn&t even know your name when you call,& he said in an interview. &But there is all this rich information today, and so our job is to help make that available when you really need it.&

(I should note he spoke to me while driving on a freeway, but he noted that the car he was in was part of a RapidSOS pilot, and so if he did have an accident, at least the responders would be more aware of what happened… Not a huge comfort but interesting.)

When you consider the number of connected wearables, connected cars and other inanimate objects that are now becoming &smart& through internet-based, wireless controls, sensors and operating systems, you can see the strong potential of harnessing that for this particular use case.

RapidSOS is not the only company thataddressing this gap in the market. Carbyne out of Israel raised a growth round earlier this year led by Founders Fund in its first investment in an Israeli startup, also to build systems to provide more data for emergency services responders.

(Carbyne, by coincidence, was also borne out of the CEO getting mugged: necessity really is the mother of invention.)

&We are completely different from Carbyne,& Martin said of the other startup. &They are trying to provide more modern software to the industry& — where companies like Motorola have long dominated — &and itgreat to see new innovation on that front. But when we looked at industry, we found the challenge was not software but the data that was being provided. There is a lot of information out there, but no data flow, which is limited by the typical emergency response system to 512 bytes of data.&

He says that RapidSOS, in that regard, works with multiple vendors, including Carbyne, to transmit that data.

And itthat platform-agnostic approach that interestingly caught the eye of Playground.

&RapidSOS is on the forefront of emergency technology, working with companies like Apple, Google, Uber, and Microsoft to transform emergency communication,& said Bruce Leak, co-founder of Playground Global, in a statement. &We see endless opportunities for connected device data to enhance emergency response and are eager to work with RapidSOS to expand their life-saving platform.&

Taranis, an ag-tech startup that uses aerial scouting and deep learning to identify potential crop issues, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series B led by Viola Ventures. Existing investors Nutrien (one of the worldlargest fertilizer producers), Wilbur-Ellis venture capital arm Cavallo Ventures, and Sumitomo Corporation Europe also participated.

Tel Aviv-based Taranis says its aerial imaging technology, carried on high-speed drones or manned aircraft, is currently used by farms in Argentina, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. It plans to expand into more countries with this round of funding, including Australia.

Founded in 2015 by Ofir Schlam, Asaf Horvitz, Eli Bukchin, and Ayal Karmi to increase food production, Taranis& software targets commodity crops like corn, cotton, wheat, soybean, sugarcane, and potatoes. It identifies potential crop issues, including insect damage, nutrient deficiencies, and diseases, and provide farmers with magnified, high-resolution images that are detailed enough to (for example) let them see what bugs are eating their plants.

In a press statement, Viola Ventures partner Zvika Orron said &After analyzing the digital farming industry, we proudly choseTaranisto be our first investment in this space. Taranishas all the necessary ingredients to become the leader in farm digitalization: a comprehensive precision agriculture solution, leading industry partners to scale and penetrate the market and a passionate team making it all happen.&

Traditional crop monitoring is labor-intensive and not always accurate, even with the use of sensors to track soil quality, fertilizer levels, insects, and other issues. Other venture capital-backed startups using computer vision and AI-based technology to make the process more efficient (a growing field referred to as &precision farming&) include Prospera, which is also based in Tel Aviv, Arable, and Ceres Imaging.

Agricultural giants have also started shopping for precision farming startups. For example, over the past twelve months, Deere agreed to buy Blue River, and Brazilian startup Strider was purchased by Syngenta.