Technology

Sometimes fake news lives inside of Facebook as photos and videos designed to propel misinformation campaigns, instead of off-site on news articles that can generate their own ad revenue. To combat these politically rather than financially-motivated meddlers, Facebook has to be able to detect fake news inside of images and the audio that accompanies video clips. Today its expanding its photo and video fact checking program from four countries to all 23 of its fact-checking partners in 17 countries.

&Many of our third-party fact-checking partners have expertise evaluating photos and videos and are trained in visual verification techniques, such as reverse image searching and analyzing image metadata, like when and where the photo or video was taken& says Facebook product manager Antonia Woodford. &As we get more ratings from fact-checkers on photos and videos, we will be able to improve the accuracy of our machine learning model.&

The goal is for Facebook to be able to automatically spot manipulated images, out of context images that don&t show what they say they do, or text and audio claims that are provably false.

In last nightepic 3,260-word security manifesto, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that &The definition of success is that we stop cyberattacks and coordinated information operations before they can cause harm.& That means using AI to proactively hunt down false news rather than waiting for it to be flagged by users. For that, Facebook needs AI training data that will be produced as exhaust from its partners& photo and video fact checking operations.

Facebook is developing technology tools to assist its fact checkers in this process. &weuse optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from photos and compare that text to headlines from fact-checkers& articles. We are also working on new ways to detect if a photo or video has been manipulated& Woodford notes, referring to DeepFakes that use AI video editing software to make someone appear to say or do something they haven&t.

Image memes were one of the most popular forms of disinformation used by the Russian IRA election interferers. The problem is that since they&re so easily re-shareable and don&t require people to leave Facebook to view them, they can get viral distribution from unsuspecting users who don&t realize they&ve become pawns in a disinformation campaign.

Facebook could potentially use the high level of technical resources necessary to build fake news meme-spotting AI as an argument for why Facebook shouldn&t be broken up. With Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp combined, the company gains economies of scale when it comes to fighting the misinformation scourage.

Walmart is ramping up its grocery delivery business on the international stage with todayannouncement that it has acquired the crowdsourced, on-demand delivery marketplace Cornershop for $225 million. The rapidly growing service offers on-demand delivery from supermarkets, pharmacies and specialty food retailers in Mexico and Chile, which will continue following the dealclose, Walmart says.

Founded in 2015, Cornershop last year raised $21 million in a round led by Accel, according to Crunchbase, in order to expand its service in Latin America. At the time, CEOOskar Hjertonsson credited Instacartsuccess in the U.S. as inspiring enthusiasm for grocery delivery in other international markets, as well, saying & I think Instacart can build a profitable business in the US, as can we down here.&

To date, it has raised $31.7 million, Crunchbase says. Other investors include ALLVP, Creandum, NMT Network, Jackson Square Ventures, and Endeavour Catalyst.

Similar to Instacart, Cornershop works with contractors who visit the stores to shop then deliver customers& orders. However, it also lets you order from several stores & like grocers, speciality wine or meat shops, and others & in one order.

The service has been expanding its reach a fast pace, Walmartannouncement points out. Over the past 12 months, it has seen the number of unique customers double.

Cornershopthree founders, including CEO Oskar Hjertonsson; COO Daniel Undurraga, and CTO Juan Pablo Cuevas, and their teams, will continue to run the business following Walmartacquisition.

&We are focused on making life easier for customers and associates by building strong local businesses, powered by Walmart,& said Judith McKenna, president and CEO of Walmart International, in a statement.

&Cornershopdigital expertise, technology and capabilities will strengthen our successful businesses in Mexico and Chile and provide learning for other markets in which we operate. This is an opportunity to leverage both of our brands, as well as Walmartstrong supply chain and store network. Combining Cornershopinnovative, crowdsourced delivery platform with Walmartunique assets will allow us to accelerate growth for both companies, delighting our customers by saving them both time and money. We are excited to welcome Cornershop to the Walmart family,& she added.

The acquisition is one of several investments Walmart has made in order to compete on grocery delivery in international markets.

The retailer just last month announced it co-led a $500 million investment in Chinese online grocery service Dada-JD Daojia, which is part-owned by JD. And in January, Walmart partnered with Rakuten on a wide-ranging partnership that includes grocery delivery in Japan as well as the sale of Rakuten e-readers, e-books and audiobooks in the U.S.

Walmarttop rival Amazon has also been focused on international expansions of its grocery delivery business, with launches in markets likeLondon, Berlin and Tokyo, for example. Italso aiming to bring its online shop to more countries through international versions of its site, as well as acquisitions of its own. Last year, Amazon bought SOUQ to go after the Middle East, and today it says SOUQ shoppers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can now shop over 1 million products from AmazonGlobal Store.

Walmart says the Cornershop acquisition will be subject to regulatory approval and is expected by the end of the year.

If you are a woman who has used the internet to buy something, particularly if you are a woman who has used the internet to buy something in the Bay Area, therea very high likelihood you have seen ads for Rothy&severywhere you go on social media, particularly Facebook. In fact, they&ve likely been following you for years. The reason: spending big on Facebook and, to a slightly lesser extent, Instagram, has paid off hugely for the three-year-old, San Francisco-based company, which makes shoes out of recycled materials.

Its signature product is its ballet shoe for women, which comes in two silhouettes — a rounded and a pointed-toe version — and 21 patterns. But like most e-commerce brands, Rothyhasn&t been content to stop with one apparently winning product. Instead, earlier this year, the company introduced a womenloafer, followed by a line of shoes for girls ages five through12 that mirror its ballet shoe line for grown-ups.

Today, itextending its product line again, introducing what it calls a sneaker, though itreally a sneaker in as much as Vans classic slip-on skateboarding shoesare sneakers. In short, they&re fun and colorful, but you probably don&t want to play basketball in them.

Last summer, to learn more, we&d talked with RothycofoundersRoth Martin and Stephen Hawthornthwaite about the company, which has so far raised just $7 million in funding — all of which closed around the time of our conversation.

Yesterday, we chatted with a newer executive at the company, Kerry Horton Cooper, who joined Rothypresident earlier this year after working previously as the COO an CMO of ModCloth and as a VP at Walmart.com, among other roles. We asked if Rothyis raising another round any time soon. She also caught us up on what else is happening at the startup, which has now grown to 500 employees, including 450 who work out of the companyown, 100,000-square-foot factory in Southern China.

TC: Rothyis a hot brand. Will we see another round close in 2018

KC: We haven&t raised anything beyond that one institutional round that closed last summer. We&re profitable and cash-flow positive, unlike a lot of other [newer brands] so that hasn&t been an urgent issue, though itsomething we entertain as we think about whatstrategically important.

TC: How many shoes has Rothysold

KC: We don&t disclose that, but in May, we passed what we&d sold in all of 2017, and our sales in 2017 were probably 1,000 times the sales were generated in 2015. I think we clearly have product-market fit.

TC: You introduced some newer products earlier this year — a loafer and a kids& line of shoes. Why

KC: The durability and washability of our shoes appeals to a lot of people and to a lot of parents, some of whom especially enjoy the mommy-and-me look. The shoes are also easy to dress up and dress down, though itstill a small part of our business.

TC: Are Rothyshoes still available exclusively through your website

KC: We also opened a store on San FranciscoFillmore street in May, an old cobblerstore that we restored.

TC: Is that the first step to more stores in more cities

KC: There are obvious other markets like New York and Washington and Boston — heavy transit cities. Thereprobably a little more opportunity as we think of more locations here (in California). But we want to be measured in how we approach this to ensure the retail strategy is sustainable.

TC: Rothyhas its own factory in China but I assume you are past the point of making your shoes to order.

KC: We aren&t doing made to order. There are core colors that we always want to have in stock, and we&re pretty clear about just how much we need to make. When it comes to newer colors, we have a supply chain we can chase. We&ll launch some things on a Thursday and basically, by the next day, we can tell what the winners are. We also produce limited runs of shoes to surprise and delight people visiting the store. We&ve played with embroidery, for example.

TC: Why introduce slip-on sneakers, too

KC: Itkind of an iconic stye that we&ve been watching for a while but we wanted to wait to introduce to get the right fit and appearance first, especially because we don&t have laces to make the fit right. But these, too, are made from all recycled materials. They&re machine washable. They also have a foam wedge that provides more cushioning.

TC: Has Rothymarketing strategy changed at all Judging by my Facebook feed, it has not.

KC: Social media continues to be a really important channel for us, though the largest channel is word of mouth. Ita very distinctive-looking shoe, so people stop and ask people about them, which increases returns as more people wear them. But Facebook and Instagram are the biggest drivers. On Instagram, our customers send us more beautiful photography than we could do ourselves and we&ve leveraged that. We&ve also dabbled with influencers, though less at the Kardashian level and more around interesting women with interesting style who other women look up to.