Mark Zuckerberg: 699 Million People Use Facebook Today And Soon We'll Connect The Whole World
Facebook now sees 1.15 billion monthly users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Wednesday.
Way more than half of them log in every day: 699 million daily active users, he said.
Now the company has way bigger goals.
"We're at this interesting point. For a while getting to a billion people was this big rallying cry," Zuckerberg said. "When we started getting closer to that goal, we realized, no one wakes up in the morning saying, 'I want to get 1/7 of the people in the world to do something.'"
While 1 billion users was a "nice round number" and "happens to be bigger than anything else that anyone's built, a billion isn't a magical number," he said.
So Facebook wants to solve a bigger problem like "connecting the next 5 billion people. It's going to be really hard because a lot of them don't have Internet access."
To do that, Zuckerberg dreams of nothing less than "over the next five or ten years, we want to understand everything in the world semantically and kind of map everything out. We want to play a role in helping people create companies and create jobs."
That's a lofty goal. But he's serious. Last week Facebook launched an organization called Internet.org, with a mission to bring the Internet to the parts of the world that lack it. He's brought in some big guns to help too, including Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.