Meta onboards Kalaari Capital to scale early-stage startups in India

 Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced a partnership with VC fund Kalaari Capital to upskill and scale young, invested businesses in India by providing them with timely business skilling support.

Mark Zuckerberg‘s Meta (formerly Facebook) on Wednesday announced a partnership with VC fund Kalaari Capital to upskill and scale young, invested businesses in India by providing them with timely business skilling support. The partnership is a part of Meta’s ‘VC Brand Incubator Initiative’ for the growth of micro, small and medium businesses in the country.

“As part of this initiative, Meta has partnered with India’s largest VC funds. We are thrilled to now partner with Kalaari Capital that has been instrumental in the growth journey of many startups,” said Ajit Mohan, VP and MD at Meta in India. Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based in Bengaluru. “As startups scale, they need to leverage several tools and platforms like Meta to support their growth,” said Vani Kola, Founder and Managing Director, Kalaari Capital.

Jio Platforms now more valuable than rest of RIL businesses put together

At Wednesday’s price, RIL’s market capitalisation stood at Rs 8.64 trillion. This means, the other businesses are being valued by the Street at Rs 4.28 trillion

Reliance Industries’ (RIL’s) deal with Facebook to sell 9.99 per cent in Jio Platforms has two messages for the oil to telecom major’s shareholders. The key one is that Jio Platforms is now more valuable than all other businesses of RIL put together, including refining, petrochemicals and retail.

Consider this: Facebook is buying 9.99 per cent stake in Jio Platforms, a 100 per cent subsidiary of RIL, for Rs 43,574 crore. This translates into a market/equity value of Rs 4.36 trillion for Jio Platforms. RIL’s stock gained over 10 per cent after the deal was announced. At Wednesday’s price, RIL’s market capitalisation stood at Rs 8.64 trillion. This means, the other businesses are being valued by the Street at Rs 4.28 trillion.

ALSO READ: Why Facebook is spending billions for a minority stake in Reliance Jio

The other message is that the deal has kick-started the monetisation of digital assets and will help RIL reduce debt, create an incremental revenue stream and could lead to higher valuations for its consumer facing verticals, especially Reliance Retail. The news of falling leverage levels is positive as it came at a time when its core oil and gas vertical was facing major headwinds because of the collapse of crude oil prices. This had raised concerns over the completion of the deal with Aramco, wherein the world’s biggest oil producer was looking at picking up 20 per cent stake in RIL’s chemical and refining business in a deal valued at $15 billion. With the fresh investment from Facebook, leverage concerns have receded…

How for better or worse, Mark Zuckerberg has become too big to fail

Even if Mr. Zuckerberg bore most of the responsibility for the company’s cataclysmic recent history, he alone possessed the stature to fix it.

A few weeks ago, after Facebook revealed that tens of millions of its users’ accounts had been exposed in a security breach, I began asking people in and around the tech industry a simple question: Should Mark Zuckerberg still be running Facebook?

I’ll spare you the suspense. Just about everyone thought Mr. Zuckerberg was still the right man for the job, if not the only man for the job. This included people who currently work at Facebook, people who used to work at Facebook, financial analysts, venture capitalists, tech-skeptic activists, ardent critics of the company and its giddiest supporters.

The consensus went like this: Even if Mark Zuckerberg — as Facebook’s founder, chief executive, chairman and most powerful shareholder — bore most of the responsibility for the company’s cataclysmic recent history, he alone possessed the stature to fix it.

More than one of his supporters told me it was bad faith to even broach the subject — that Mr. Zuckerberg’s indispensability was so plain that the only reason I might have to ask whether he should still run the company was the clicks I would get on this article. But even critics were not that excited about the idea of Mr. Zuckerberg’s removal. Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, an organization that fights monopoly power, argued that Facebook’s problems grew out of its business model and the legal and regulatory vacuum in which it has operated — not the man who runs it.

“To be blunt, if we took Mark Zuckerberg out and we replaced him with Mahatma Gandhi, I don’t think the corporation would change in any significant way,” Mr. Lynn said.

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Facebook violates privacy policy, allows phone makers to access users' data

While the device partnerships allowed Facebook to expand its reach, it let the phone makers offer customers popular features of the social network



Raising fresh concerns about Facebook's privacy protection policies, a New York Times report has exposed how the social network allowed about 60 device makers, including Apple and Samsung, to access personal information of users and their friends.

Even before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, Facebook had data-sharing partnerships with the device makers, the report said citing company officials, adding that most of the deals remain in effect.

While the device partnerships allowed Facebook to expand its reach, it let the phone makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, "like" buttons and address books.

The deals raise concerns about the company's privacy protections and compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), The Times said.

Facebook, which is already under scrutiny for misuse of millions of its users' data after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal became public, reportedly allowed the device companies access to the data of users' friends without their explicit consent.

While Facebook's leaders said that the kind of access exploited by the political consulting firm in 2014 was cut off by the next year as it prohibited developers from collecting information from users' friends.

But the company officials did not disclose that such restrictions were not applicable to makers of cellphones, tablets and other hardware, the report said.

However, Facebook officials denied the device partnerships violated its privacy policies, the FTC agreement and pledges to users.

They said its partnerships were governed by contracts that strictly limited use of the data, including any stored on partners' servers, adding that they knew of no cases where the information had been misused.

"These partnerships work very differently from the way in which app developers use our platform," Ime Archibong, a Facebook vice president was quoted as saying.

Why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is winning the US Senate hearings

The social-media giant's economic model emerged unscathed despite hours of questions from senators

Mark Zuckerberg did just fine in his first turn in the Congressional hot seat. He was confident. He capably tackled many of the queries proposed last week by Bloomberg columnists. The 33-year-old billionaire appeared humble throughout much of the hearing, with only a few smug smiles.

The best news for Facebook Inc. the company was that Zuckerberg ably deflected any challenges to the beating heart of its economic model: its hungry data collection and the fine-tuned targeted advertising based on that data. Zuckerberg's success is a win for anyone primarily concerned with the company's market value. But it's a loss for the rest of us.

Facebook will keep failing users' trust as long as its business is based on unrestrained hoovering of as much user data as possible, and crafting ever-more innovative ways for advertisers to harness that information for commercial goals. It's an arrangement to which Facebook's users agree and can sidestep, technically, but it is hardly informed consent or a real option to avoid.

This inherent conflict was on display during two of Zuckerberg's exchanges on Tuesday. The first was with Senator Roy Blunt, the Republican from Missouri. He asked Zuckerberg a series of questions about what information the company can collect on its 2 billion users and use for advertising, including whether the social network can pinpoint that a person who posts on Facebook from his work computer in the morning is the same person who uploads a photo to his Facebook smartphone app at night.

The answer, as Zuckerberg surely knows, is yes. Facebook brags to advertisers that it can provide "cross-device" targeting, as it is called. The company can also track people nearly everywhere they go online, and it can see what apps people have installed on their phones.

Facebook also collects information on "offline" activity, as Blunt also asked, which includes information on users' location as they roam around the real world. Companies can also match their information on what your purchase in stores -- that box of cereal at the supermarket, for example -- and marry it with Facebook account information. Inexplicably, Zuckerberg tried to say he wasn't completely sure about Facebook's data collection policies, and one of his underlings could follow up later. The Facebook CEO knows what his company does, but perhaps he couldn't acknowledge that his companies relies on assembling detailed dossiers on billions of people.

This exchange mattered because Blunt and others revealed the flaw in Facebook's bargain with users. The company gives us a service we find valuable, and in exchange, we agree that Facebook will harness that information to make money. Zuckerberg said everyone who uses Facebook consents to what they agree to share and has complete control of it. The trick is few people really understand what they're giving, or are capable of truly controlling it. Zuckerberg seemed to concede as much after a lawmaker brandished a stack of papers said to be Facebook's data collection and ad policy disclosures to its users.

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FB scandal: It was my mistake and am sorry, Zuckerberg tells US Senate

Zuckerberg traversed Capitol Hill on Monday surrounded by police and trailed by packs of reporters ahead of his scheduled appearance before three congressional committees

Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg swapped his trademark T-shirt and jeans for a dark suit and a purple tie on Monday as he met U.S. lawmakers to apologize for the social network's misuse of its members' data and to head off possible regulation.

His apologies precede two days of congressional hearings this week, where Zuckerberg will be asked how 87 million Facebook users' data was improperly shared with a political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica.

He will also likely face questions about ads and posts placed by Russian operatives, in what U.S. authorities believe was an attempt to influence the U.S. 2016 election.

"We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," he said in written remarks released by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday. "It was my mistake, and I'm sorry."

If Zuckerberg does not provide satisfactory answers this week, Congress is more likely to push new laws to strictly regulate Facebook. Anticipating such a move, the company has already said it favors new legislation that would make social networks disclose who is behind political ads, much as TV and radio stations must already do.

Tighter regulation of how Facebook uses its members' data could affect its ability to attract advertising revenue, its lifeblood. Facebook shares closed up 0.5 percent on Monday. They are still down almost 17 percent from highs hit in January, amid a broader tech selloff, partly because of investor concerns about regulation.

PRIVACY ISSUES

Zuckerberg traversed Capitol Hill on Monday surrounded by police and trailed by packs of reporters ahead of his scheduled appearance before three congressional committees on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Zuckerberg held meetings with the top Republican and Democratic senators on the Commerce and Judiciary committees that will question him on Tuesday in a joint meeting. He faces further grilling from the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.

On Monday, he was pictured in one photo showing his mobile device to Senator Bill Nelson, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee. He did not respond to questions from reporters as he entered and left the building.

Nelson told reporters after the meeting: “The message I wanted to convey to him is that if we don't rein in the use of social media, none of us are going to have any privacy anymore." He met Senator John Thune, the Commerce Committee's Republican chairman, later in the day. He also met Chuck Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Republican chairman, and the leading Democrat on that committee, Dianne Feinstein.

Top of the agenda in this week's hearings will be Facebook's dealings with Cambridge Analytica, a London-based company that counts U.S. President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign among its past clients, or go-betweens. Cambridge Analytica has disputed Facebook's estimate of the number of affected users.

Lawmakers are also expected to press Zuckerberg closely on the 2016 election, which he anticipated in his written testimony.

"It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm..." he said. "That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy."

Zuckerberg's testimony said the company was "too slow to spot and respond to Russian interference, and we're working hard to get better." He vowed to make improvements, adding it would take time, but he was "committed to getting it right." Facebook disclosed in September that Russians under fake names had used the social network to try to influence U.S. voters in the months before and after the 2016 election, writing about inflammatory subjects, setting up events and buying ads.

In February, U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians and three Russian companies with interfering in the election by sowing discord on social media.

The company's data practices are under investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

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