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Google co-founder Larry Page has been personally funding a pair of startups devoted to creating flying cars, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Page has reportedly funded one startup, named Zee.Aero, with more than $100 million since its creation in 2010, and putting money into another, named Kitty Hawk, since last year. His interest in the companies is a personal ambition, says Bloomberg, and he even retained an office at once of the company's headquarters, where he was referred to pseudonymously as GUS — the guy upstairs.

Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk have been developing designs for flying cars completely separately, says Bloomberg, with Zee.Aero conducting test flights of its prototypes at an airport about an hour's drive away from Google's Mountain View headquarters.Bloomberg reports that Zee.Aero has hired aerospace designers and engineers from organizations including NASA, Boeing, and SpaceX, and has been testing two single-seater prototype designs — one that looks like a "small conventional plane" and another with propellors dotted down its sides.

Previously known patents registered by Zee.Aero show a craft that matches this description, with a thin central fuselage and twin rows of propellors like outriggers. The patent, filed in 2012, says the aircraft is capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and is described as a "safe, quiet, easy to control, efficient and compact aircraft." Not quite a flying car, then, but certainly a vision of personal aviation.

The other startup Page has been investing in, Kitty Hawk, has reportedly been building its own craft "that resembles a giant version of a quadcopter drone," according toBloomberg's sources. The startup is smaller than Zee.Aero, and kept separate from its older rival. Some of its engineers come from AeroVelo — a firm that previously won the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize in 2013 for building a human-powered helicopter that can stay aloft for more than a minute (see the video below). And Kitty Hawk wouldn't be the first firm to design a quadcopter-inspired aircraft; similar concepts have been floated by Chinese firm Ehang and even built by lone engineers.

This month’s report on Google’s autonomous car fleet reveals two new features coming to the company’s prototype car, the ability to honk the horn and a hum similar to most non-electric cars.

The sound of a car horn might be the stuff of nightmares for frequent drivers, but Google believes it can be a powerful tool that may prevent accidents on the road. For the first few months, the car honked internally, but Google recently made the honk audible to nearby cars.

See Also: Musk to Apple: Try and keep up, ok?

“Our self-driving cars are designed to see 360 degrees and not be distracted, unlike human drivers, who are not always fully aware of their surroundings. Our self-driving software is designed to recognize when honking may help alert other drivers to our presence — for example, when a driver begins swerving into our lane or backing out of a blind driveway,” said Google in the report.

The self-driving system has two types of honk: two short honks as a friendly heads up to the other driver, and one long honk for urgent situations. Google’s testers report back to engineers on all honks, to make sure that the car is not being obnoxious on the road.

Google also wants to make sure pedestrians, cyclists, and visually impaired drivers know the car is active, and has added a ‘hum’ that is similar to most non-electric cars.

During the testing phase of the hum, Google explored a variety of sounds, including ambient art sculptures, consumer electronic products, and ocra noises. We hope when the car is available, Google adds these fake engine noises in a variety pack.

Google’s autonomous fleet, which totals 70 cars, reported one crash this month on May 3. The crash, according to the report, happened when a human driver was in control and nobody was hurt.

Anyone who has ever stared anxiously at a knotty equation in need of a solution has wished for some kind of ax to cut through the problem. Mathpix, the “first app that can solve math by simply taking pictures of your handwriting” may present that long-needed tool.

Lead developer Nicolas Jimenez posted a demo on Vimeo of Mathpix going through its paces. Users open the app, activating the phone’s camera. When held over a wide variety of problems, the app highlights them in green—as the iPhone does when redeeming an iTunes card via camera, for example—then sends them to a server for solutions.

“The process of entering math on a computer is painful and I wanted to find a better way,” Jimenez told Motherboard in an email.

He first began working on Mathpix while a math Ph.D. student at Stanford, he said.

Jimenez said the Mathpix team teaches “powerful deep learning algorithms to read math by feeding them large amounts of training data,” and the app’s “algorithms get smarter over time as we get data from users.”

Mathpix is used by high school students for algebra and graphing, and calculus students use it "primarily for solving integrals, for which we provide step by step solutions," Jimenez said.

It’s easy to assume math teachers and professors might be pretty wary of students having such a potentially powerful app at their disposal, but publisher-provided info indicated that Mathpix “also shows you step-by-step solutions to tricky problems, guiding you to the solution with simple, effective instructions.”

Instructors might be more likely to ask students to download the app as a valuable teaching tool, once they’re clear on its functions. The engineers and programmers behind the venerable old graphing calculator—still sold, still in use today, yes—may be the ones who need to worry about this kind of innovation.

Want to test drive Google’s autonomous car? The company has a new opening in Chandler, Arizona, for test drivers willing to get inside the self-driving vehicle and let it drive.

Not any average joe can step into the autonomous car, Google wants employees to have a bachelor’s degree and excellent communication skills. The applicant must also be able to take over the car at any time, in case the autonomous system fails.

See Also: Google self-driving car shakes fist at Palo Alto drivers

Google pairs two employees to a self-driving car, one in the driver’s seat and the other taking notes. At the end of the day, the notes will be given to the engineering team, alongside any feedback on the drive.

“Test drivers play an important role in developing our self-driving technology,” said Brian Torcellini, head of operations for Google’s Self-Driving Car testing program, to AZCentral. “They give our engineers feedback about how our cars are driving and interacting with others on the road, and can take control of the vehicle if needed.”

Google will pay employees $20 per hour and expects them to drive for six to eight hours per day, for 12 to 24 months. Assuming it’s a Monday to Friday gig, you could earn up to $38,400, a decent salary for driving around Phoenix everyday.

“The role of a test driver is so new that there isn’t a particular type of person that we look for,” Torcellini said. “We’ve hired people from all types of backgrounds, from English teachers to orbital welders. In general, they need to be excellent drivers who pay really close attention to the road and can predict the social aspects of driving. Local drivers will be great for testing in the Phoenix area because they know the roads and local driving norms better.”

Google has already clocked in over one million miles in its autonomous car, but learning about different cities may be incredibly useful for the system to understand unique traffic quirks only adopted in some parts of the United States.

Google has published its monthly report on the self-driving project, detailing any updates, advances, and accidents that have happened.

In the month of April, two accidents occurred involving the self-driving Lexuses. Both were minor incidents, which apparently stemmed from the other party hitting the self-driving car.

The first accident dinged one car’s side mirror, and happened while the Lexus SUV was stationary. The second involved the offending driver bumping into the side of the car, which – like any good teen-aged new driver – Google claims was not their fault.

Passengers in the self-driving cars were not harmed in the accidents.

See Also: Apple joins autonomous vehicle land rush in Silicon Valley

Google has been transparent about accidents for a few months, since news of several crashes emerged. They’ve even fessed  up about a recent accident by posting video, showing the self-driving car at fault during a crash with a bus.

Despite the crashes, which number in the dozens now, Google insists that self-driving will lower the amount of crashes by over 50 percent. It claims that 94 percent of crashes are due to human error, which a fully autonomous world would fix.

Google is adding 100 more cars — Chrysler Pacifica minivans to be exact — to its fleet in the next year. Bringing variety to its self-driving project may give the company more understanding of how different sized cars should interact on the roads, which may lead to less scuffles.

The cars are tested in four locations: Kirkland, Washington; Mountain View, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and Austin, Texas. Both of the accidents were in Palo Alto, a 12-minute drive from Mountain View, where Google is headquartered.

The accidents might put some lawmakers off removing restrictions, but attitude towards self-driving cars has become less hostile in the last few months, as more investment comes in from traditional automakers.

Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs is meeting with several top executives to discuss plans for a rejuvenation project in an existing city. The plan involves billions of dollars in investment to make the city high-tech, automated, and vibrant.

While details are scarce at the moment, The Information reports that Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff will meet with Alphabet CEO Larry Page to receive a green light on the “Sidewalk Project.”

See Also: Are smart citizens being lost in rush for smart cities?

If the project is approved, Sidewalk Labs might solicit bids from states or cities in need of rejuvenation. Similar to Google Fiber, Sidewalk wants the state to remove regulations on utilities, parking, and city design to give the company more autonomy over the re-design.

That might scare off some cities that are not willing to ceed control to a corporation, though others that require a major upheaval might accept these terms if it means billions in private investment, turning the city into a tech epicenter.

Alphabet already has a few high-tech divisions working on products that are useful in a smart city. The self-driving car, Project Wing, Makani, and Project Insight — which came from X Labs — could all be implemented in a controlled smart city environment.

Add to that Alphabet’s potential partnerships with other smart city companies and it might be the perfect opportunity for cities or states that require a major rejuvenation to bring residents and companies back.

No cities were mentioned in the report and for all we know Sidewalk Labs might have to go out and persuade downtrodden cities or neighborhoods to let them re-build, before they get any offers.

Rejuvenation of an entire city is hard and much harder when you remove its historic value in favor of high-tech and low regulations. While the city might look fancy, as the WSJ points out, it might lack the vibrancy of cities that were able to naturally grow into super-cities.

German tech firm tado°, a smart home play focused on climate control, has announced that it copped nearly $23 million in its latest round of funding. This is in addition to the nearly $34 million raised previously.

tado° is focused on its primary Smart AC Control, a wall-mounted device that help turn remote-controlled air conditioning units into smart climate devices by linking them to a central control unit located inside the house that connects via the internet to your smartphone.

Using infrared technology, the same technology used in remote controls that come with portable air conditioners as well as window and in-wall units, tado°’s Smart AC Control is able to control multiple air conditioning units throughout your home.

It’s been a bit of a rocky time for smart home tech, with the bricking of Nest’s Revolv smart home hub. Consumers may be becoming leery about splashing out on new tech that may go dark before it pays off for them.

“We have had the benefit of seeing the hyperscale of Nest, and learning what has and hasn’t worked in their product line and marketing efforts — and clearly the Revolv hub was a failure, that not many other Smart Home innovators could afford to repeat,” tado° founder and CEO Christian Deilmann told ReadWrite. “At tado°,  we have a very clear product roadmap, and we’re committed to further evolving our product to satisfy this very large, underserved market.”

He added they’re reaching “millions of people around the world with remote-controlled heating and cooling units looking for a smart climate control option, which is not covered by Nest or comes at a cost significantly more than our products.”

What does this mean for users? It means that you can control your air conditioners from your smartphone wherever you might be, and you can set it up so that as you move from one room to another, the room’s climate control system activates ensuring that you use less electricity and have a comfortable space wherever you might be.

The Smart AC Control can also be set to turn you unit(s) on as you head back home from work. This feature set is remarkably similar to that of popular Nest thermostats, which are used to control central air conditioning units and has recently grown as a product line to connect a wide range of devices to the home network.

It is Wi-Fi enabled so it connects to the Internet through your home’s router, has Bluetooth capability which senses when you are home, contains humidity and temperature sensors, a capacitive touch surface for easy control, and an LED matrix which indicates which mode and status it is currently in.

This latest round of funding by tado° is intended to assist in its global expansion, especially into the US market. Recently, tado has added its products to Amazon, Best Buy, and Home Depot and partnered with AT&T in its Digital Life program.

tado° has a unique place in the connected home market. For the millions of homes that rely on smaller non-central heating and air solutions, it certainly has a lot of promise. CEO Deilmann said savings depend on the home and number of AC units installed but he estimated savings for a US household of $200 to $800 a year.

The Beverly Hills City Council unanimously agreed last week to work on a plan to develop autonomous shuttles which will provide transportation for the citizens of Beverly Hills.

The idea is to create a fleet of city-owned driverless shuttles which will act as part of a municipal on-demand transportation service picking up and dropping off individuals at virtually any spot in the city.

So, instead of hiring an Uber driver or calling for a taxi, the people of Beverly Hills will be able to call for and hop in driverless shuttles that will take them anywhere in the city they want to go.

The Beverly Hills City Council wants to pave the way for autonomous vehicles to occupy roads in the United States – without breaking the budget of their riders.

Until recently, purchasing a vehicle with self-driving capabilities has been a recent experience reserved for the wealthy.

Tesla recently received over 325,000 reservations of its upcoming Model 3 vehicle, which has a moderately high price tag of $35,000 – roughly half the price of any Tesla vehicle prior. One of the key features of a Tesla vehicle that has so many people eagerly standing in line for it: autonomous driving.

From a safety standpoint, autonomous vehicles are proven to be as safe – if not safer – than ones driven by a human.

According to several studies, over 90% of all vehicle accidents are caused by human error. This includes driving while distracted, intoxicated, or simple lapse in judgement.

Google’s Self-Driving Car Project has already exceeded 1.7 million miles of autonomous driving on US roadways in cities including: Mountain View, CA, Austin, TX, Kirkland, TA, and Metro Phoenix, AZ.

During all that time, not one accident out of the 11 that Google was involved in was attributed to the autonomous vehicle.

Even a city with as small of a footprint as Beverly Hills’ 5.7 square miles could benefit greatlyfrom this initiative. Traffic congestion, driver costs, the need for parking spaces, and the amount of accidents taking place in its roadways stand to be reduced by an accessible fleet of autonomous vehicles.

This autonomous vehicle program will be discussed in greater detail during a public summit set to be held this fall. Attendees will receive demonstration rides and witness expert-lead panel discussions on the new program.

Azure was something that wasn’t on very many developer radars at first. That is, until it teamed up with Mesosphere and Docker to create its own container scheduling and orchestration solution.1 The Azure Container Service entered general availability on April 19th, 2016 with developers able to access features such as Mesosphere’s DC/OS and Docker Swarm. These are particularly useful when working with microservices, running containers at scale in production, or utilizing containers in a testing environment.

Azure has been significantly focusing on its Big Data offerings, spearheaded by its Cortana Intelligence Suite. Azure utilizes elastic scaling in its SQL Data Warehouse, while users processing large-scale data workloads will want to consider signing up for a trial of Azure Data Lake. Data Lake offers users no fixed limits on file size or account size, with the ability to work with structured or unstructured data sets. SQL Data Warehouse offers enterprises looking to set up a hybrid cloud solution for their data flexibility in both storage and security.

For developers focused on building applications, Azure offers the ability to set up VMs with ease, without having to worry about manually scaling them. Azure auto-scales based on actual traffic, ensuring that applications will continue to function even under peak loads. Azure also supports nearly every common programming language, is the clear leader for .NET developers, and offers continuous deployment built into the platform. This means new code can be pushed at any time through GitHub, BitBucket, or Virtual Studio to ensure that crucial deadlines are met without issue.

Amazon AWS has a lot going for it when stacked up against nearly any competitor. Namely, its powerhouse of networking, storage, databases, and delivery/deployment options available to developers. Amazon EMR and Kinesis offer real-time data processing, along with the strength of the Hadoop framework. Developers can control their entire stack with AWS, making it an end-to-end solution ideal for enterprises with teams that are looking to manage and analyze their workflows from start to finish.

AWS offers customers not only EC2 for computing, but large-scale data storage such as S3 and Glacier, an ever-growing variety of databases to choose from, out-of-the-box deployment configuration, and load balancing. The benefit to utilizing AWS for many developers will ultimately be the insights, analytics, and level of control that AWS offers its users. By having access to the inner workings of one’s entire stack, enterprises can quickly drill down to locate problems and resolve them before end users are impacted by an issue, while bottlenecks or underperforming services can be isolated for review.

It goes without saying that the AWS cloud is also massive–Over 10x the size of its competitors. The size doesn’t affect its performance, as AWS has only experienced a handful of outages in its time. Overall, AWS has withstood the test of time, continuing to improve and upgrade its offerings to better serve their users while refusing to cut corners to do so.

Google burst onto the cloud computing scene in a big way with the announcement of theGoogle Container Engine and its own Google Cloud Platform, which have quickly gained a dedicated following. Google Cloud is also one of the more affordable solutions, while offering its users a wealth of tools for working with Big Data, such as Google BigQuery and Cloud DataProc. The Google Container Engine gains a significant boost for those interested in usingKubernetes as their container solution, as Kubernetes is optimized to run on the Google Cloud Platform.

When choosing which cloud provider to work with, you must consider not only the amount of storage required by your applications or the amount of data processed, but the overall goals of your organization. Whether looking for an end-to-end solution, a container orchestration setup, or a way to quickly build and deploy applications, every business will have varying needs.

Ultimately, Amazon AWS is the way to go for enterprises looking for an end-to-end solution to their system management both front-end and back-end. AWS offers not only massive storage capabilities, but is available in the most countries with the least amount of outages, while continuing to make constant improvements toward improving its services.

While the war between AWS, Azure, and Google shows no signs of slowing down, matchingyour organization’s overall goals with the solutions offered by a cloud provider is the first step toward streamlining your development workflow long-term.

Alex Miller is a business analyst at Clutch, a Washington, DC-based professional services and software consulting firm.

Though fully autonomous vehicles won’t be rolling out for another decade or two, equities analysts are already finding investment potential in Mobileye, the makers of new collision avoidance technology that is slated to become standard in most new cars.

As reported by CNBC, Morgan Stanley’s lead automobile sector analyst was bullish on buying stock in Mobileye which specializes improving driver safety with collision detection technology. Such technology is a component of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which he says will soon become standard in new automobiles long before fully autonomous cars hit the road.

“Toyota has already said that pretty much every car that they sell in the U.S. is going to have ADAS by 2017, 70 percent of cars they sell in Europe by 2015. Volkswagen said something similar a few years out,” he said.

“Nissan is already making an automatic braking standard in Japan by the fall of this year. If you assume roughly 100 million cars sold by the end of this decade, we say 40 percent will have ADAS options by 2020 and that goes up to 70 percent by 2029,” said Shanker. He raised his Mobileye price target from $65 to $68 and held his overweight rating on its shares.

A similar play happened a few years ago in hybrid vehicle technologies, where some typically hybrid systems were rolled out across entire model classes and platforms that were not “classic” hybrids.

But not all analysts were as bullish on Mobileye stock, which is facing more driverless automobile technology competition from companies like Google.

Steve Grasso, Director of Institutional Sales with Stuart Frankel, also raised concerns that Mobileye’s collision prevention technology relies primarily on cameras, compared to competitors who use radars and cameras.

“If you start to see these little companies start to build, it’s radar that they have to start building on, not just camera base so I think that’s more accurate and I think with driverless cars you’re going to see that type of technology overtake Mobileye,” Grasso said.

The future of autonomous vehicles might give millions of elderly and disabled citizens a chance at driving, but new draft regulations released in December by the state of California point to a long battle for fully driverless cars on the road.

Google’s director of the self-driving project, Chris Urmson, said he was disappointed in the draft regulations, which state that the driver must be able to control the car at all times. This is similar to the current laws on autonomous vehicles, which Tesla have already implemented.

See Also: For self-driving future, fire the crash test dummies

Google will still be able to test its vehicles on driverless mode, but a driver is still required to sit in the vehicle. That is a low blow for the company, which might have been hoping for a bit of leeway this year as it prepares to commercialize its self-driving project.

Several organized groups called for a relaxation in the laws and a way for disabled people to control autonomous cars. “If there’s an autonomous car, there needs to be a means by which a blind person can operate that car as well,” said Parnell Diggs, board member of the National Federation of the Blind to Medill.

“It would behoove the auto industry to certainly keep the elderly and the disabled in mind, as a growing proportion of the American population are aging baby boomers,” said Kenneth Jon, researcher at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

Autonomous cars remove a lot of the issues some elderly people have in cars, like short sight and slow reactions. All of these improvements are for nought however, if regulations maintain that a driver needs to be inside the car and able to take command at all times.

Full autonomy might not come until 2020, according to Baidu, the Chinese company that is currently working on self-driving cars in Silicon Valley. Others, like Tesla, General Motors, and the PSA Group have similar predictions on when the market will be ready for driverless cars.

Until then, it looks like we’re stuck with highway self-driving and self-parking features coming to more cars.

The Chinese web search giant Baidu is looking to expand its autonomous car program to the United States by bringing a 100-person team to Silicon Valley. This puts it in the same space – and now, same neighborhood – as its closest American equivalent, Google.

Baidu isn’t a household name here in the United States, but in China, it is the go-to search engine for over 80% of its 1.35 billion citizens. It was also the first Chinese company to be listed on the NASDAQ-100 index, making it an easy company to compare to Google.

Like Google, Baidu has been branching out in recent years to social networking, mobile operating systems, and even self-driving cars.

See also: Baidu wants self-driving cars on the roads by 2018 

Baidu says the Silicon Valley team will be known as Autonomous Driving Unit-US, or ADU-US. It will focus on areas integral to self-driving car development, including planning, perception, control and systems. ADU-US will work alongside Baidu’s existing Silicon Valley-based teams, including Baidu Research.

Earlier this month, Tesla opened its doors to receive pre-orders for its yet-to-be-unveiled Model 3. It received over 325,000 pro-orders – many of which were made sight unseen – in just a few days. One of the primary drivers of interest in this vehicle was Tesla’s self-driving mode that enables you to take your hands off the wheel and enjoy the ride while the car changes lanes, turns, and navigates you to where you want to go.

With interest in autonomous vehicles this high, it’s no surprise that Baidu has decided to jump in and develop its own platform that it can then partner with manufacturers like BMW to bring to market.

“Baidu is fully committed to making self-driving cars a reality,” said Jing Wang, SVP of Baidu and General Manager of Baidu’s Autonomous Driving Unit. “Autonomous vehicles will save lives and make transportation more efficient. Baidu’s Silicon Valley car team will play a significant role in building the car of the future.”

After swamping the Detroit Auto Show for the past two years, event directors have decided to debut an autonomous spin-off show in 2017, called
AutoMobiliD.

The event will be held in Cobo Center Atrium in Detroit, Michigan on Jan 8, according toBoston Free Press. The atrium offers a 120,000 square-foot space and indoor test track for manufacturers to preview self-driving capabilities to industry experts and fans of the motor companies in a controlled environment.

See Also: Volvo tests self-driving cars in China and Sweden

“AutoMobili-D will provide an international look at the ever-changing world of consumer mobility and the ecosystem of companies and innovations that are driving this exciting transformation,” said Sam Slaughter, 2017 NAIAS chairman. “AutoMobili-D will provide the ideal platform for B2B networking and thought-provoking demonstrations.”

The spin-off event comes at a time where auto shows are struggling to maintain a powerful spot in the industry. Regular manufacturers are starting to prefer livestreaming or virtual reality announcements to spending loads on a spot at an auto show. Autonomous cars are in a different zone however, as manufacturers preview one or two features instead of an entire car at auto events. Previews require test drivers and a lot of space, two things auto shows have in.

“Just as NAIAS has served as the leading global venue for automakers to debut brand-defining vehicles, AutoMobili-D will be the go-to setting for automakers, suppliers and startups alike to unveil advanced technologies and initiatives that will move the transportation industry into the next century,” said Slaughter.

Next year, we might see the first iterations of “mind-off” autonomous cars, which require minimal human interaction to drive. We are already seeing NuTonomy potentially launch a taxi service in Singapore, Baidu preparing to launch a similar service in China, and Google setting their sights on driverless software on the roads by 2018.

Add to that General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and Citroën all working on autonomous vehicles, and the Detroit autonomous show looks to be a packed event full of startups and big name brands.

Whoa! Now, that's something we should definitely think about!

On this Earth Day, take a pledge and recycle your old electronic goods like smartphones, laptops, and batteries, and save the planet from dumping unimaginable pounds of wastes and polluting it.

Surprisingly, you don't have to do much to recycle your old smartphone. Visit a local company outlet near you and drop off your device. It's as simple.

However, there are a few things to keep in mind before giving away your device for recycling.

Do not forget to wipe out your personal information from your devices. Factory Reset is by far the easiest and the best way to achieve this. It is also advisable to remove batteries from products, as the recycling process is different between them.

So, how to approach for recycling?

Well, if you are an Apple product user, kudos! The company buys back their old products from customers and recycle them. Specific Apple products like iPad 2, iPhone 4, Macs from 2007 or newer are eligible for gift cards, wherein you can get up-to 10 percent off on purchasing a new Apple device on the company website.

On a thoughtful note, Apple uses a robot called Liam to extract different components including cobalt and lithium from batteries, gold and copper from the camera, and silver and platinum from the main logic board.

Apart from Apple, many other smartphone manufacturers like Samsung and LG and carriers like Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile also have different programs to recycle the old products. As mentioned above, just drop off your old device at a local store near you.

It doesn’t take long for Facebook to start bluntly insulting the stalwart advertising medium. “Gone are the days when a family gathered around their TV on Sunday night to connect with the outside world. Television is no longer a guaranteed way to reach and engage your target audience,” Facebook writes. It cites an eMarketer studying saying time spent on digital will surpass TV in 2013, and notes people open their phone 100 times a day and Facebook 10-15 times a day.

Facebook then hits hard with graphs and Nielsen stats, saying that each major TV network only reach 55% to 61% of 18-24 year olds during prime time, but Facebook reaches 70%. Facebook later hawks its “Blast” campaigns that let brands reach the majority of people on Facebook with a video ad within one to three days.

Other than Google, few digital companies have the ability to reach an entire populace, which classically could only be found on TV. Facebook slams other digital properties, stating  ”A lot of time is spent by people on mobile with Google properties, YouTube, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Twitter and Pinterest…And more total time is spent on mobile on Facebook and Instagram than all of those combined.” It’s that scale, the ability to reach hundreds of millions of people quickly, that Facebook hopes will attract the world’s biggest advertisers.

“On TV, advertisers don’t always know who people are, and over deliver to certain people and can’t reach other people. So advertisers end up hitting the same people over and over again with a large portion of the audience being underexposed.” Again, Facebook isn’t pulling punches here.

One of the social network’s greatest assets is its trove of ad-fueling personal data. Users pour demographic and interest data into their profiles to share with friends and be found, but Facebook also leverages that data to be able to pinpoint them with relevant ads. Taking a dig at YouTube where a lot of demographic data is inferred indirectly and not always accurately, Facebook writes “In narrowly targeted campaigns, the average online reach is 38% accurate, but on Facebook, our average reach is 89% accurate.”
Facebook also touts that users volunteer to watch video ads on its platform instead of being required to watch on YouTube, so the impressions should be valued higher. “When you use video on Facebook, these are chosen views – the consumers clicks to play or scrolls through to watch the video as compared to an ad on YouTube interrupting the user experience and feeling forced.”
Still, Facebook doesn’t want its ad partners coming off as bullies so it explains “Avoid saying anything negative about YouTube.” Instead, partners are supposed to lay out the facts and just imply YouTube is inferior.
Except that it isn’t, at least not right now. And Facebook admits that.

“BACKGROUND FOR SALES RE: VIDEO INSIGHTS vs. YouTube
Currently, we only report on video plays, which is a weakness compared to YouTube, which reports on video views, completed views, and average duration of view. We are working on building out our video insights to give advertisers a better sense for how videos are performing. New video insights target launch: Q1 2014. [NOTE: Video insights improvements are highlight (sic) confidential]“

So by next year, Facebook’s video ad insights will be a better match for YouTube, but until then, partners are supposed to cite metrics about likes and comments, larger ad images, and a more “streamlined” post-click experience. The fact is that Television is the status quo for advertisers, and YouTube’s roadblock ads (even if you can skip them after five seconds) work similarly to traditional TV commercials. That means Facebook still has an uphill climb in selling its video ads.
While users might be scared that these video ads will stick out like sore thumbs on Facebook, the company is actually in the middle of a push to bring a lot more organic, user generated video to the site. It’s now rolling out its new auto-play video feature on the web and mobile. Facebook mentions videos ads you “scroll through”, which could be a subtle way of noting that auto-play video ads are coming.
But the big thing absent from this deck is measurement. TV and some other online ad platforms have a tough time proving that marketing spend on them generates a return on investment. Facebook may be discounting one of its most potent weapons in the ad war. Online, Facebook hooks into sales information through cookies, hashed CRM data, and Autofill With Facebook. Offline, brick and mortar data providers like Datalogix and Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool let advertisers see if showing someone an ad made them buy more.
It may not be the platform with the biggest reach, targeting, or engagement that captures the ad dollars fleeing television in print, but the one that can best prove its ads actually work.
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More on Facebook’s big video push:
Facebook Puts The News Feed In Motion
Facebook Videos Now Auto-Play On Mobile, Expect Video Ads Soon
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Full leaked video ads deck below with Facebook’s presenter notes as captions.