The idea of using GPUs for more than just fun and games is nothing new. It started with niche high-performance computing applications such as seismic data processing for oil and gas, fluid dynamics simulations and options pricing. But now Nvidia thinks it has found its killer app in the form of deep learning.

“I think we are going to realize looking back that one of the biggest things that ever happened is AI,” CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in his opening keynote at this year’s GPU Technology Conference. “We think this is a new computing model, a fundamentally different approach to developing software.”

The combination of lots of data, better algorithms and powerful GPUs has led to a big bang in modern AI. In many cases, deep learning is now surpassing the capabilities of humans. Examples of this progress in the past year including Microsoft’s work on image recognition with the ImageNet database, Berkeley’s work on robotics, Baidu’s speech recognition services, and most recently Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo.

This is why Nvidia has gone “all in” in on deep learning, as Huang said repeatedly. And no product is more indicative of that than the company’s new Tesla P100 GPU, a big bet that took three years, thousands of engineers and some $3 billion in investment.

The Tesla P100 isn’t the first Nvidia GPU to use an advanced 16nm manufacturing process with 3D FinFET transistors and the new Pascal architecture–the company announced its Drive PX 2 for self-driving cars at CES earlier this year–but it is by far the most complex with 15.3 billion transistors on a chip measuring 610 square millimeters. To make things a bit more challenging, it also includes four stacks of high-bandwidth memory–16GB in all–in the same package using foundry TSMC’s CoWoS (Chip-On-Wafer-On-Substrate) technology. “The odds of this working at all is approximately zero,” Huang joked.

Based on what is known internally as the GP100 GPU with 60 streaming multiprocessors, the Tesla P100 uses 56 of these SMs, each with 64 FP32 (32-bit) CUDA cores and 32 FP64 (64-bit) CUDA cores clocked at 1.3GHz though it can also burst a bit higher. The result is peak performance of 10.6 teraflops single-precision and 5.3 teraflops double-precision. The 3,584 FP32 CUDA cores can also be used in FP16 half-precision mode, which is sufficient for most deep-learning tasks, and pushes the performance to 21.2 teraflops. That’s nearly 2.5 times the performance of the current Tesla K80, which is manufactured on a 28nm process (Nvidia skipped 20nm) and uses two Kepler GPUs. The GP100 also has more cache and 14MB shared register files, as well as significantly more bandwidth (80TBps), which means it can handle larger jobs more efficiently.

Rival AMD was the first to introduce High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) in its Radeon R9 Fury X consumer cards based on the 28nm Fiji GPU. But Nvidia is the first to use second-generation HBM, which delivers higher capacity and greater bandwidth (AMD had once planned to release a Polaris part with HBM2 this year, but an updated roadmap from the recent Game Developers Conference shows this has been pushed back to Vega in 2017). Each stack consists of four 8Gb (1GB) memory chips each with 5,000 TSVs (through-silicon vias) to connect them to each other and to the rest of the system. The Tesla P100 has four of these stacks for a total of 16GB with 720GB per second of peak bandwidth. HBM2 also supports error correction, a key requirement for many HPC applications.

The Tesla P100 also uses a new interconnect called NVLink which provides better performance than PCI-Express 3.0 in workstations or HPC clusters that use multiple GPUs (most deep-learning algorithms use four or eight GPUs for training). The Tesla P100 has four 40GB per second links for a total of 160GB per second of bidirectional bandwidth between GPUs. NVLink can also be used to connect the GPUs with IBM Power CPUs in servers (Nvidia is part of the OpenPower consortium). The GP100 also improves on the unified memory model in CUDA 6 by allowing programs to access all of the memory in the CPUs and GPUs in the system as a single virtual address space simultaneously while maintaining coherency without a big performance hit.

The Tesla P100 is already in volume production and Nvidia has started delivering it to key hyperscale customers that build their own servers. Cray, Dell, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and IBM are also building Tesla P100, which will be announced later this year and start shipping in the first quarter of 2017.

In the meantime, to get the Tesla P100 in the hands of researchers that do a lot of the foundational work on deep learning, Nvidia has built its own server, which it is billing as the “world’s first deep learning supercomputer.” The DGX-1 is a 3U server with two 16-core Xeon CPUs, 512GB of memory, eight Tesla P100 GPUs, 7TB of solid-state storage, and dual 10Gbps Ethernet and 100Gbps InfiniBand ports. Nvidia says the DGX-1 is capable of 170 teraflops and a full rack will deliver up to two petaflops, though it’s worth noting that Nvidia is talking about half precision (FP16) for deep learning here, which makes some of the comparisons with Xeon-only or older GPU servers a bit misleading. The bottom line is that Tesla P100-based servers like the DGX-1 can train models much faster. Nvidia is already taking orders, and the DGX-1 will start shipping in June for $129,000. The company also announced partnership with Mass General, which it said will use the DGX-1 to process 10 billion images to advance the hospital’s work in radiology, pathology and genomics

The Tesla P100 and DGX-1 join a product family that already includes the Tesla M40 for training and the more power-efficient M4 for execution (or inference), which Nvidia said has rapidly become its fastest-growing business due to adoption by cloud service providers all over the world. During the keynote, the company also announced the Nvidia SDK, a single toolkit that combines all of its libraries: GameWorks; DesignWorks (ray-traced photorealistic images); VRWorks for using popular game engines to develop content for Oculus Rift and HTV Vive headsets; ComputeWorks; the IndeX plug-in for data visualization; and DriveWorks, a suite of libraries or algorithms for self-driving cars that is still under development. For deep learning, the key announcements were a new version of its training library, cuDNN 5, due in April and GIE, short for GPU Inferencing Engine, to make execution more energy efficient. By using GIE, a Kepler-based Jetson TK1 embedded board improved its performance from 4 images per second per watt to 24 images per second per watt. “This makes CUDA both the highest performance and most energy efficient approach to doing GPU computing,” Huang said.

Nvidia has clearly made inroads with the hyperscale guys. At the keynote, Baidu’s Bryan Catanzaro talked about the company’s work on end-to-end deep learning for speech recognition and said the Tesla P100 will enable it to handle models that are 30 times larger. Google’s Rajat Monga talked about TensorFlow, which the company already uses for some 1,200 applications and is now available as open source on Github. But just how big a business all of this will be is the subject of debate. There are some 1,000 AI start-ups with $5 billion in funding. Amazon, IBM, Google and Microsoft are all rolling out AI as a service (and Salesforce just acquired MetaMind). And it is now starting to make its way into industries such as retail, life sciences and automotive. Huang argues that AI won’t just be a big business, it will be part of every business. Whether that really happens over the next couple of years will depend in part on whether Nvidia can successfully deliver a hardware and software platform that makes deep learning faster, more efficient and easier.

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Amazon’s same-day delivery service is today seeing a notable expansion here in the U.S. The online retailer announced this morning that same-day delivery, which is available to members of its $99 annual Prime membership program, is now live in 11 more metropolitan areas and is rolling out to more neighborhoods in the markets where it already operates.

Specifically, Amazon is bringing same-day delivery to a number of medium-sized cities, like  Charlotte, Cincinnati, Fresno, Louisville, Milwaukee, Nashville, Raleigh, Richmond, Sacramento, Stockton, and Tucson. Meanwhile, it will also now be available in new areas in Central New Jersey, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

Consumers will need to login to Amazon to see if their particular address is supported.

In total, that means Amazon’s same-day delivery is now available in 27 metro areas across the U.S., or more than 1,000 cities and towns. That should worry competitors like Target and Walmart, who have been trying different ways to combat Amazon’s threat, ranging from ship-to-store programs, curbside pickup, and more. Walmart is even testing its own Prime competitor, “ShippingPass,” with no minimums and 3-day shipping.

With Amazon same-day delivery, Prime members place orders in the morning in order to take delivery by bedtime (i.e., 9 PM), and is available for a subset of Amazon’s inventory. Today, that includes over a million items across dozens of categories.

The service is one of now several tiers for faster deliveries Amazon offers. While the company’s Prime program offers free, two-day shipping on over 30 million items, it has been rapidly expanding its speedier delivery options in specific markets.

In addition to same-day, Amazon also offers Prime Now in over 25 metro regions, which offers tens of thousands of items for two-hour delivery from a dedicated mobile app. And through Prime Now, Amazon has also been expanding into restaurant deliveries and, in some markets, alcohol delivery.

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In a flurry of news this morning, it would appear that Twitter has won a deal with the NFL that gives the social network the right to stream Thursday Night Football live on the platform.

Beyond the live stream of the game, the partnership will also include pre-game Periscope broadcasts from players and teams, as well as in-game highlights from TNF.

Bloomberg first reported the news this morning based on sources familiar with the matter. A few minutes later, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell tweeted a confirmation, with the NFL posting this official announcement.

Bloomberg reports that Twitter beat out other major players in the tech space, including Verizon (which owns Aol, which owns TechCrunch), Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook.

Re/Code’s Peter Kafta is also reporting that Twitter paid only $10 million for these streaming rights, beating out larger offers from other players, as high as $15 million.

Given Twitter’s slowing growth numbers — the company has plateaued at around 300 million active users — this deal could be a huge boost for the platform. Putting aside its slower growth than networks like Facebook, Twitter is best when paired with live TV. It’s the fine Cabernet to a medium-rare filet mignon.

With the new deal, Twitter can likely see more engagement out of fans who never really cared for Twitter, but came to the platform for some Thursday Night Football.

This is also an important move for the NFL, which has long been the stronghold of cable television. As more and more users cut the cords, the NFL is having to think beyond the cable model to reach as many viewers as possible.

But if you’re a cable kid with a football package, have no fear. The big game will still be available on television and on other parts of the web.

Specifically, Twitter won the global streaming rights to 10 games of the 16 TNF games to air this season. That means that the games will still air on CBS, NBC, and the NFL Network, as well as their respective web sites. That said, CBS.com (and the others) will only have the right to stream domestically and not worldwide.

This seems to be an important piece to pay attention to given the relatively low price of the deal. Remember, CBS and NBC are paying around $450 million (combined) to air TNF for the season. Twitter’s bid pales in comparison.

Part of the reason for the low price is that CBS and NBC get to keep their digital advertising inventory for the games, since Twitter will just be re-broadcasting the networks’ feeds. The other reason Twitter might have gotten away with just $10 million, if that number is correct, is that Twitter says it has a rather large global audience.

Even though the company only has 320 million active users, it also argues that it has a global audience of up to 800 million when you include folks who visit the service but don’t sign in.

Here’s what Jack Dorsey had to say:

This is about transforming the fan experience with football. People watch NFL games with Twitter today. Now they’ll be able to watch right on Twitter Thursday nights.

He’s also excited for his dad.

All in all, it’s an interesting way to start the 2016 NFL season.

Featured Image: EKS/Shutterstock

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A security flaw in Apple’s newest iPhones lets anyone bypass the phone’s passcode and access personal information.

The bug, posted on the Full Disclosure mailing list, is limited to the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, which land with the new 3D Touch feature, and is present on iOS 9.2 and later — including the latest iOS 9.3.1 update, released last week.

Anyone with physical access to an affected phone can access the user’s contacts, photos, text and picture messages, emails, and phone settings, according to the disclosure.

ZDNet was not able to independently verify the flaw at the time of writing.

Benjamin Kunz Mejri, who found the bug, reached out to Apple last month but did not hear back within a two-week window. He said that the vulnerability can be temporarily fixed by disabling Siri from the lock screen.

The bug is reminiscent of a similar bug found by the same developer earlier this year, which requires an attacker to conduct a carefully performed time-based attack.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

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Huawei is making a lot of noise and some big claims about the dual cameras in their new, Leica co-engineered Huawei P9 smartphone. But will the phone live up to the hype out in the real world, in real photographers’ hands? EyeEm teamed up with Huawei to find out.

Photographer, digital artist, and Photoshop master Erik Johansson just released the behind the scenes video for his latest creation, and you may be surprised when you find out just how much work (not retouching, on-location work) goes into setting up a dreamscape like this.

There is a big craze for Sony full frame (FF) mirrorless cameras at the moment, and seeing people rush onto that bandwagon is like watching lemmings following each other over the cliff.

Re-saving an image over and over and over again in a lossy format (a format like JPEG that tosses some data each time you save/compress the file) slowly but surely degrades the image. This is called generation loss, and it’s demonstrated beautifully in these almost painful-to-watch YouTube videos.

Image recognition is widely used to flag and remove offensive content from social media these days, but sometimes artificial intelligence isn’t very intelligent. One Instagram user just found that out after she had her account disabled for posting a photo of a cake.

Holy crowdfunding success Batman! Lomography has done it again, and by “done it” we mean launched an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign. Their new Daguerreotype Achromat 2.9/64 Art Lens just went up on Kickstarter this morning at 5am Eastern time, and by 2pm it had already broken $200K in funding!

Here’s an amazing short film titled “The Old New World” by photographer and animator Alexey Zakharov of Moscow, Russia. Zakharov found old photos of US cities from the early 1900s and brought them to life.

Take a moment, rewind back to March of 2012 and remember the buzz that surrounded the release of the Fujifilm X-Pro1. Many of my close photography friends — professionals, casuals, Sony fanboys, and even film shooters — were talking Fuji and discussing how they must have the X-Pro1.

The photographer Sator has created quite a buzz with his article “Why Sony’s Full Frame Pro Mirrorless Was a Fatal Mistake.” I thought long and hard about whether I should response to this or not. I think there are many things omitted in his analysis and I want to point out some of those points.

It’s been a little over a month since Leica promised to “reinvent” mobile photography in partnership with Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei, and today they’re following up on that promise. The long-awaited, much-rumored, and much-leaked Huawei P9 has arrived.

Photographer Peter Stewart is an internationally published photographer who’s also popular on photo sharing sites, boasting tens of thousands of followers and millions of views on 500px, Flickr, and Instagram. Here’s an eye-opening series of his before-and-after post-processing comparisons.

It came out first in 1940, when Europe was plunged into war but America was enjoying the dying days of calm before the storm. It was Kodak’s new black-and-white film, designed to be shot on location. The only problem was, it was only available in large format.

Gap is apologizing this week after a photo in its new Gap Kids ad campaign sparked controversy for a “racially insensitive” pose. The photo shows a white child model resting her arm on a black child’s head.

Magnum photographer David Hurn has had the type of career one dreams of. He photographed stars like the Beatles and Sean Connery, and worked during what he describes as one of the friendliest eras in professional photography. But can you guess what one piece of advice he always gives his students? “Wear good shoes.”

We’re getting closer to being able to take pictures with cameras built directly into contact lenses. Samsung has been granted a patent in South Korea for a smart contact lens that projects images directly into the wearer’s eyeball… and which has a built-in camera that’s controlled by blinking.

Leica announced back in February that it’s “reinventing” mobile photography by partnering with the Chinese smartphone giant Huawei. We soon got a glimpse of a leaked Huawei P9 phone with dual, supposedly Leica-made, cameras. Now the company has confirmed it: the upcoming Huawei P9 was created with Leica.

I was one of those who noted Sony had some troubles, as manufacturers often do, with some of their first generation lenses for full-frame FE mount cameras. When they announced the G Master lens series I was really excited to test them.

New York Times Magazine photography critic, Teju Cole, recently penned what could only be construed as a takedown of National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. Cole is no lightweight. Since its launch, his column On Photography has illustrated his deep understanding of photographic history – not to mention he’s an award-winning writer with a PhD in Art History from Columbia.

Having trouble nailing tack-sharp autofocus with your camera? Aside from technical proficiency, there are a number of other issues that could be causing you AF grief. Here’s a 14-minute video on 8 common AF problems and their solutions.

Photographer Jason Lanier says he was doing a photo shoot at a park in Texas when a man drove his truck over his camera gear bag that contained tens of thousands of dollars in gear.

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The masochists at iFixit are back at it. After recently prying open the new iPhone 5SE, the teardown specialists have labored over the new iPad Pro 9.7-inch edition — with the usual results for an Apple tablet.

It’s no secret that iPads — like many of Apple’s products — are difficult to repair, which is why iFixit exists in the first place. But the smaller iPad Pro is even less easy to take apart to fix than its bigger brother. While the original iPad Pro 12.9-inch received a result of 3 out of 10 on iFixit’s Repairability Score, the 9.7-inch edition earns just a 2 out of 10.

The iPad Pro 9.7-inch mixes the higher-end specs of the 12.9-inch model with the form factor of the iPad Air. That means something like the Smart Connector — allowing for Apple’s Smart Keyboard — has to be added to the new tablet. As iFixit mentioned in its 12.9-inch teardown, the Smart Connector is seemingly impossible to replace, though the odds are you won’t need to, as it doesn’t have any moving parts. Likewise, the iPad Pro 9.7-inch shares the design of its bigger brother when it comes to fusing of the LCD panel and the front glass, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in terms of opening the tablet, but can add to replacement cost if you need a new screen.

The key disadvantage to the new iPad Pro’s interior, however, is how the battery fits inside the case. The 12.9-inch Pro received kudos from iFixit for using adhesive pull tabs under the battery that simplify the process of removing the batteries in a manner similar to the design of recent iPhones. Alas, the tabs haven’t found their way into the smaller iPad Pro, as the battery is just glued in, increasing the degree of difficulty (and messiness) of removing it.

Of course, ease of repair is pretty far down Apple’s list of important considerations when designing its products, whose thin-and-light designs make manufacturing tricky enough to begin with. The company’s recent history has been fairly anti-DIY when it comes to giving users the ability to upgrade, modify, or fix their purchases. Instead, Apple needs to be more concerned with the slowing sales of its iPads, and whether the new iPad Pro is good enough to start collecting more buyers. (According to ZDNet’s own Cliff Joseph and James Kendrick, it just might be.)

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Amazon announced this morning a plan to spread adoption of its payments service, Amazon Payments, to more third-party websites. With the launch of its Amazon Payments Global Partner Program, the retailer will help e-commerce platform providers and other developers integrate with Amazon Payments so their own merchants can offer the option to “Pay with Amazon” at checkout.

Already, Amazon Payments can be used by individual merchants who can choose to integrate the company’s tools, like “Login and Pay with Amazon,” in order to offer an easy way for online shoppers to authenticate with their Amazon account information on a third-party website, then pay for their purchases with the credit card information they have on file with Amazon.

The idea here is that merchants could tap into Amazon’s already sizable user base, and then eliminate the need for these customers to create a separate username and password on the merchant’s website. And by making checkout quicker, merchants could increase conversions and boost sales.

With the new Global Partner program, however, the goal is to offer an expanded set of services to e-commerce platform providers themselves, instead of just individuals merchants. At launch, a number of partners have agreed to integrate with Amazon Payments, and then offer that option to their own merchants and sellers, including PrestaShop, Shopify, and Future Shop, for example.

As partners, these businesses will be able to take advantage of a variety of services that include things like white glove integration, account management, planning support, technical resources and training, and more. They’ll also be listed in a Partner directory, and some may also be eligible for co-marketing activities, says Amazon.

The specific services and benefits will be determined by the partner’s status, which falls under one of three tiers: Premier Partner, Certified Partner, and Certified Developer. The program is currently in an invite-only status in the U.S., Germany, U.K. and Japan.

The news was announced at the Money 2020 event in Copenhagen by way of a release.

The move is a clear signal from Amazon that it intends to ramp up its competition with other payment service providers, like PayPal, Visa, Apple Pay, and others, on the wider web. (Apple Pay is rumored to be coming to mobile websites this year.)

This expansion also comes at a time when Amazon Payments has seen a surge in growth and adoption. Re-launched in 2013 after years of experiments in the area of online payments, Amazon said this January that transaction volume had grown 150 percent last year over the year prior, and average orders were around $84. Merchants using Pay with Amazon also grew by 200 percent in 2015, but the retailer didn’t provide hard numbers.

However, Amazon is able to continue on this same path, it could prove to be a notable threat to its competitors in the months ahead. The company has 285 million account holders, and some 23 million-plus have now used their accounts on non-Amazon websites.

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Land grab! Net neutrality! Imperialism! There was a lot of justified outrage (and perhaps delight) when Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of bringing the Internet to rural Indians came crashing down recently, fueled by the 11 million people who contacted the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in protest and 457 companies and more than 800 startups that signed letters vehemently opposing Facebook’s Free Basics initiative.

After getting hit by that tidal wave of blowback, Facebook discovered that scaling in India is not so simple. While most of the debate around Free Basics, and its subsequent defeat, centered around net neutrality, the saga is really the result of a set of larger, incorrect assumptions by Facebook on how to reach and on-ramp rural customers.

With some distance from the initial raw reaction, it’s a good time to evaluate why Facebook’s Free Basics strategy for India was fundamentally flawed, and probably not worth the fight in the first place.

Discovery, trial and viral expansion happened in other markets just by making Facebook available. Once someone tried Facebook, they would see an interesting, existing network, after which Facebook could use analytics to prompt further engagement, all from the Bay Area.

If that context held in India, then offering Facebook for free through a telecom partner would be great strategy for grabbing the next wave of rural Indian mobile Internet users. However, meaningful adoption in India often requires a far more nuanced understanding of how customers make a decision, and, ironically, a grassroots approach to managing a physical sales and distribution channel.

Focusing on core product is not enough

Companies like Amazon and Uber have learned that many of the cultural and business assumptions from markets like the U.S. don’t apply in India. This includes the first tenet of product development in the Bay Area: focus only on your core value proposition and product experience, after which adoption will follow. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

In the developed markets where car ownership and credit card use were a given, Uber simply needed to focus on its core job of attracting drivers and consumers onto their mobile platform. Overhead was minimal, allowing the company to expand quickly.

Then came India, which became the first market in the world to force them to bring in third-party payment partners and ultimately accept cash. Moreover, Uber needed to become a financing company as well as a taxi company, because few of the drivers owned or could easily afford a car.

Similarly, you can’t simply ship a package from a warehouse in India and assume it will be delivered — much less delivered in a window of specific time. Amazon’s core strengths globally have been its massive selection, efficient supply management and focus on customer loyalty.

That still is the key, but to scale in India, Amazon also needed to become a highly efficient logistics company, with innovative distribution strategies and cash management capabilities, far beyond what FedEx could imagine. Jeff Bezos reinforced this in a recent article where he said that Amazon had to reassess “assumptions that American customers have taken for granted for decades. We know that in order to win in India we need to do things we have never done in any other country.”

In both cases (and others), multinationals gained traction slowly against locally grown competitors only after they implemented a comprehensive set of India-specific operations and capabilities to scale their networks.

How does this apply to Facebook? Their primary assumption to acquiring rural users is wrong and, at least for the next year or two, they will need to do something that they likely haven’t had to do anywhere else.

You will need to build a physical sales channel through partners

Any foreign company trying to reach consumers in rural India will have to compete, or partner, with numerous local companies that have built large, grassroots merchant networks across the country. Although expensive and difficult to manage, the merchants in these networks have the strongest influence over what a local consumer does, from which mobile phone they buy, to which mobile operator they choose (all operators will be sold side by side), to which apps they download to their phone.

For on-boarding the rural and lower-income population to full-service mobile Internet, the first interaction for customers will be an assisted one -– at their trusted local store. In remote areas, that store will not only serve as the one-stop, assisted e-commerce location, but also as the local financial service point for paying bills, banking and accessing government services.

This is in part because of a cultural difference between the U.S. and India. In America, there’s a “DIY” (Do-it-Yourself) culture that encourages a person to test and try new experiences, products and technologies on their own. In contrast, India often has a “do-it-for-me” expectation — especially for new services — which means that a user often relies on someone else to do the initial groundwork, then set them on a path toward habitual use.

People who already rely on their local store for trusted help and advice are not going to stop doing this just because Facebook offers free data and they hear a passing reference to it by a minimally paid telecom sales agent. The money used to fund free data might be better utilized as incentives to the local store owner to make sure the first app downloaded and set up on a villager’s new phone (purchased three days earlier from Amazon via that same store) is Facebook and not Hike, PayTM or SBI Buddy.

Just because something is free, doesn’t it mean it will be valued

The West has the tendency to assume that poor or lower-income countries simply want free stuff; that price is the major barrier to adoption. My experience suggests that, within a certain range of affordability, people are more value-sensitive than price-sensitive.

When offered a service that delivers real value — whether it is real-time communication with any family member, pre-paying for an hour of electricity to cook food or reading via a low-cost LED lamp — even people at the bottom of the pyramid make decisions and pay money based on utility as opposed to what’s free. They also make decisions in line with that which they are familiar and comfortable.

We have worked with several financial service institutions that are bringing microloans, pensions and other banking services to the masses. When asked whether a villager will give up Rs.50-100 ($1-2) per month to set up a pension scheme, villagers are more than willing to do so. The business problem wasn’t generating consumer demand but operationally scaling face-to-face awareness and collections.

From a strategic point of view, Facebook and other companies should focus on which part of their service can deliver immediate gratification and financial or lifestyle benefits to a user. WhatsApp is no doubt useful, but what else can Facebook offer with the data or features that they have to solve first-principle problems for a family.

Adoption will happen, with or without the West

Marc Andreessen ignited a Twitter firestorm with his comments that implied that, without Free Basics, Indians were going to be kept off the grid. The reality is that the big barrier to rural mobile Internet adoption is non-terrestrial high-speed mobile network connectivity, access to low-cost smartphones and the availability of services or goods that fill immediate needs (e.g. banking, communication, consumption, government services), not the availability of social network services.

Here’s a final message to Silicon Valley — don’t worry about Indian adoption. It will happen, and at a pace faster than anything the U.S. will have seen. More than one hundred million bank accounts were opened within six months last year after the government and public sector banks made it a focus. Mobile Internet adoption will happen at scale in the next 24 months, whether or not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have any part in it.

To his credit, Zuckerberg has been largely graceful about the defeat of Free Basics, perhaps taking a page from Jeff Bezos. Zuckerberg has responded that he remains committed to his programs in India. For him to succeed, Zuckerberg will have to do the hard work of building a scalable, physical distribution channel that incentivizes merchants to bring consumers on board, one by one.

This will be a slower, more labor-intensive approach, but it’s the best way to connect and have a meaningful impact on the Indian consumers Facebook is trying to reach. That’s the lesson all entrepreneurs can take from Free Basics.

Featured Image: MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty Images

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Way back in December, Google added a to-do function called Reminders to the Google Calendar iOS and Android apps. Now, at long last, it is available for the web.

Reminders basically amp up Google Calendar’s to-do list, so you can not only create tasks in your Gmail inbox, Google Keep, or calendar, but see a reminder that shows up on top of your Google Calendar, haunting you until you finally pay that bill or call that person or do whatever it is that you keep putting off, like emailing for a Revolv refund.

For people who were juggling Google Calendar with to-do apps (the ones I’ve tried include AnyList, ToDoist, Wunderlist, Any.do, and a Post-it note stuck to the back of my phone case), Reminders is a small but extremely handy feature and being able to manage tasks on the web will make it even more useful, especially when I lose my phone.

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When Microsoft announced its Windows 10 strategy last year, the thinking was that the unified platform would drive Windows Mobile and finally bring the Windows phone out of the doldrums where it’s been virtually forever.

The idea was you could develop once for Windows 10 desktop and easily share that code on any device, making it impossibly attractive for developers, which would finally drive Windows Mobile popularity in a beautiful virtuous development cycle.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way, and Microsoft finds itself in an unusual position, developing software for iOS and Android because it simply doesn’t have a viable Windows mobile ecosystem.

According to comScore’s latest market share numbers, Microsoft had 2.9 percent market share in the U.S. for the fourth quarter last year. That was unchanged since September, in case you were wondering. In its fourth quarter earnings report in January, Microsoft reported a smartphone platform deeply in decline.

That would cover the period where the Windows 10 mobile development magic was supposed to be happening. As you can plainly see, the plan doesn’t seem to have worked as drawn up.

Windows 10 is out. It appears to be getting great adoption on 270 million devices, but it doesn’t seem to have trickled down to Windows smartphones much at all.

Singing different tunes

Here’s how Satya Nadella outlined how he hoped his mobile strategy would play out in an interview with Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet last year:

“[T]he free upgrade for Windows 10 is meant to improve our phone position. That is the reason why I made that decision. If somebody wants to know whether I’m committed to Windows Phone, they should think about what I just did with the free upgrade to Windows, rather than — hey, I[‘m] making four more phone models of value smart phones.”

In an interview with Matt Rosoff from Business Insider this week, Rosoff pointed out the lack of discussion of Windows Mobile at last week’s Build developer conference. Nadella’s position was more nuanced this time:

First of all, I don’t think of Windows for mobile differently than Windows for HoloLens or Windows for Xbox now. We have only one Windows. We don’t have multiple Windows. They run across multiple form factors, but it’s one developer platform, one store, one tool chain for developers. And you adapt it for different screen sizes and different input and output.

TechCrunch’s Haje Jans Kamps also noticed that the Windows phone was conspicuously absent from the Build conference keynote discussions. At one point while introducing Xamarin, the presenter put it like this:

“We don’t care if it’s Android or iOS, we have you covered,” the presenter said, and continued onto the rest of his presentation. “Spot any platforms missing from that two-bulletpoint-list,” Kamps wondered with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

Getting by with some help from their friends

The question remains; can Microsoft succeed without a strong Windows mobile position? From the looks of things, they don’t seem to have much choice. Nadella appears to be staking his position in the cloud, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play it, while opening up his company’s tools to iOS and Android in the absence of any meaningful Windows phone adoption.

When you look at the beauty of the mobile-cloud connection, it’s understandable Microsoft would want to be there with Windows, but perhaps Nadella is beginning to understand that Windows is not necessarily the future of the company — Azure and Office 365 are — and that could explain why the company stayed firmly focused on these two areas at Build.

When you combine that with the idea of bots created by Microsoft, including Cortana (Microsoft’s talking virtual assistant), that can run in Microsoft’s tools or external platforms like Slack and LINE, you start to see a vision where Microsoft thrives even without an in-house mobile platform.

As the world moves swiftly to that mobile-cloud intersection, perhaps the underlying OS becomes less important. If that’s the case — if Microsoft can have a piece of the underlying cloud-mobile plumbing and have apps and bots created in its ecosystem, run anywhere on any device — it renders the Windows phone gap irrelevant.

For Microsoft with its weak mobile position, it had better hope that’s the case.

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