Technology

Facebookfuture rests on convincing the developing world to adopt Stories. But just because the slideshow format will soon surpass feed sharing doesn&t mean people use them the same way everywhere. So late last year, Facebook sent a team to India to learn what features they&d need to embrace Stories across a variety of local languages on phones without much storage.

Today, Facebook will start rolling out three big Stories features in India, which will come to the rest of the world shortly after. First,to lure posts from users who don&t want to type or have a non-native language keyboard, as well as micropodcasters, Facebook Stories will allow audio posts combining a voice message with a colored background or photo.

Facebook Stories will get an Archive similar to Instagram Stories that automatically saves your clips privately after they expire so you can go back to check them out or re-share the content to the News Feed. And finally, Facebook will let Stories users privately Save their clips from the Facebook Camera directly to the social network instead of their phone in case they don&t have enough space.

Facebook Stories Archive

&We know that the performance and reliability of viewing and postingStoriesis extremely important to people around the world, especially those with slower connections& Facebookdirector of Stories Connor Hayes tells me. &We are always working on ways to improve the experience of viewingStorieson all types of connections, and have been investing here — especially on our FB Lite app.&

Facebook has a big opportunity to capitalize on Snapchatfailure to focus on the international market. Plagued by Android engineering problems and initial reluctance to court users beyond U.S. teens, Snapchat left the door open for FacebookStories products to win the globe. Now Snapchat has sunk to its slowest growth rate ever, hitting 191 million daily users despite shrinking in March. Meanwhile, WhatsApp Status, its clone of Snapchat Stories has 450 million daily users, while Instagram Stories has over 300 million.

As for Facebook Stories, it was initially seen as a bit of a ghost town but more and more of my friends are posting there, in part thanks to the ability to syndicate you Instagram Stories there. Facebook Stories has never announced a user count, and Hayes says &We don&t have anything to share yet, but performance of FacebookStoriesis encouraging, and we&ve learned a lot about how we can make the experience even better.& Facebook is hell-bent on making Stories work on its own app after launching the in mid-2017, and seems to believe users who find them needless or redundant will come around eventually.

My concern about the global rise of Stories is that instead of only recording the biggest highlights of our lives to capture with our phones, we&re increasingly interrupting all our activities and exiting the present to thrust our phone in the air.

Thatone thing Facebook hopes to fix here, Facebookdirector of Stories Connor Hayes tells me. &Saving photos and videos can be used to save what you might want to post later & So you don&t have to edit or post them while you&re out with your friends, and instead enjoy the moment at the concert and share them later.& You&re still injecting technology into your experience, though, so I hope we can all learn to record as subtly as possible without disturbing the memory for those around us.

Facebook CameraSave feature

The new Save to Facebook Camera feature creates a private tab in the Stories creation interface where you can access and post the imagery you&ve stored, and you&ll also find a Saved tab in your profilePhotos section. Unlike Facebookdiscontinued Photo Sync feature, here you&ll choose to save imagery one at a time. It will be a big help to users lacking free space on their phone, as Facebook says many people around the world have to delete a photo just to save a new one.

Facebook wants to encourage people to invest more time decorating Stories, and learned that some people want to re-live or re-share their clips that expire after 24 hours. Thatwhy its built the Archive, a hedge against the potentially short-sighted trend of ephemerality.

On the teamjourney to India, they heard that photos and videos aren&t always the easiest way to share. If you&re camera-shy, have a low-quality camera, or don&t have cool scenes to capture, audio posts could get you sharing more. In fact, Facebook started testing voice clips as feed status updates in March. &With this weekupdate, you will have options to add a voice message to a colorful background or a photo from your camera gallery or saved gallery. You can also add stickers, text, or doodles& says Hayes. With 22 official languages in India and over 100 spoken, recording voice can often be easier than typing.

Facebook Audio Stories

Some users will still hate Stories, which are getting more and more prominence atop Facebookfeed. But Facebook can&t afford to retreat here. Stories are social media bedrock — the most full-screen and immersive content medium we can record and consume with just our phones. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself said that Facebook must make sure that &ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don&t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.& That means Facebook Stories needs Indiahundreds of millions of users.

There will always be room for text, yet if people want to achieve an emotional impact, they&ll eventually wade into Storytelling. But social networks must remember low-bandwidth users, or we&ll only get windows into the developed world.

For more on Facebook Stories, check out our recent coverage:

Todaythe big day for the Senatebig push to undo the FCC&Restoring Internet Freedom& order nullifying 2015net neutrality rules. A vote is scheduled for this afternoon on whether to repeal that order, though as of this writing the coalition is still one vote shy of making it happen.

The vote is an application of the Congressional Review Act, which as you might guess from the name allows Congress to review and if necessary undo recent regulations enacted by federal agencies. Itbeen seldom used for decades but the current administration has been very free with it as a method of squelching rules passed in the twilight of the Obama era. Today Senate Democrats strike back with the same weapon.

A simple majority is required, but right now only a single Republican Senator, MaineSusan Collins, has courageously stepped across the aisle to join the Democrat-led effort. One more would pass the bill, though it would still have to get through the House and the presidentdesk, making its prognosis poor.

That matters little, though: until today, many senators will have been able to largely stay silent on the issue, and a vote to support this highly unpopular rule may come back to bite them come midterms. Net neutrality may very well be an issue constituencies care about, or at least thatwhat Democratic challengers are hoping for.

On the other hand, a Democratic-led CRA is a direct, partisan attack on the administration, which has supported this FCCactions, and would cause return to Obama-era rules, which few Republicans would relish.

Will any Republican senators see the writing on the wall and flip Or will they stick to the party and leave it to be decided by a tie-breaker vote almost certain to go in their favor Tune in to the Senate webcast to find out; the vote should happen around 3PM Eastern, but as always in government timing is only approximate.

As we increasingly hear about automation, artificial intelligence and robots taking away industrial jobs, Parsable, a San Francisco-based startup sees a different reality, one with millions of workers who for the most part have been left behind when it comes to bringing digital transformation to their jobs.

Parsable has developed a Connected Worker platform to help bring high tech solutions to deskless industrial workers who have been working mostly with paper-based processes. Today, it announced a $40 million Series C cash injection to keep building on that idea.

The round was led by Future Fund with help from B37 and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Airbus Ventures and Aramco Ventures. Todayinvestment brings the total to nearly $70 million.

The Parsable solution works on almost any smartphone or tablet and is designed to enter information while walking around in environments where a desktop PC or laptop simply wouldn&t be practical. That means being able to tap, swipe and select easily in a mobile context.

Photo: Parsable

The challenge the company faced was the perception these workers didn&t deal well with technology. Parsable CEO Lawrence Whittle says the company, which launched in 2013, took its time building its first product because it wanted to give industrial workers something they actually needed, not what engineers thought they needed. This meant a long period of primary research.

The company learned, it had to be dead simple to allow the industry vets who had been on the job for 25 or more years to feel comfortable using it out of the box, while also appealing to younger more tech-savvy workers. The goal was making it feel as familiar as Facebook or texting, common applications even older workers were used to using.

&What we are doing is getting rid of [paper] notebooks for quality, safety and maintenance and providing a digital guide on how to capture work with the objective of increasing efficiency, reducing safety incidents and increasing quality,& Whittle explained.

He likens this to the idea of putting a sensor on a machine, but instead they are putting that instrumentation into the hands of the human worker. &We are effectively putting a sensor on humans to give them connectivity and data to execute work in the same way as machines,& he says.

The company has also made the decision to make the platform flexible to add new technology over time. As an example they support smart glasses, which Whittle says accounts for about 10 percent of its business today. But the founders recognized that reality could change and they wanted to make the platform open enough to take on new technologies as they become available.

Today the company has 30 enterprise customers with 30,000 registered users on the platform. Customers include Ecolab, Schlumberger, Silgan and Shell. They have around 80 employees, but expect to hit 100 by the end of Q3 this year, Whittle says.