Mark Zuckerberg reveals his one rule for hiring at Facebook

'It's a pretty good test and it has served me well,' Facebook founder tells audience at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

As the founder of one of the most successful companies on the planet, when Mark Zuckerberg gives job advice it’s a good idea to listen.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, the 30-year-old Facebook CEO revealed what he looks for in a prospective employee. And the answer is simple.

“I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person,” Mr Zuckerberg told the audience.
“It's a pretty good test and I think this rule has served me well.”

Mr Zuckerberg, who has a net worth of around $35 billion, said that he and his team look for people whose values align with Facebook's own.
“Facebook is not a company for everyone in the world,” he told those gathered at the world's biggest wireless phone fair during a Q&A.

One of those people who clearly passed the test is Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, whom Mr Zuckerberg hand-picked for the role.

When asked by an audience member what it is like to work with Mrs Sandberg, Mr Zuckerberg said he considered her a mentor and someone who has been instrumental in building Facebook into a business and "healthy organisation.”

Facebook’s staff is relatively small compared to other tech giants in Silicon Valley, such as Google, which has almost 55,000 employees. Mr Zuckerberg said that was crucial part of the social media company’s success.
"The most important thing is to keep your team as small as possible," he went on. "[Facebook] serves more than a billion people around the world but our team has fewer than 10,000 people.
"It's only possible because of modern technology. Big companies get bloated."


“I started Facebook when I was 19. You hear a lot when you’re young that you don’t have experience to do things, that there are people that have more experience than you, and you should defer to them, let them run your company. This misses each person's unique perspect," he said.
He was asked if the world’s biggest social network had ambitions outside of social media and the Internet, but said Facebook is “pretty focused.”

Facebook’s goal of connecting people globally is “pretty broad,” he said.
This includes enabling people to share their own photos and videos and message each other as well as giving businesses a platform.
Facebook is also trying to get more people in developing countries online through its Internet.org push and developing its virtual-reality technology.

Apple Watch: the questions we want answered

What we still don't know about the Apple Watch and the key unanswered questions

When Apple chief executive Tim Cook announced the long-awaited Apple Watch in San Francisco last September, he ended years of speculation over when the Californian tech giant would finally move into wearables. But the grand unveiling also posed some key questions which remain unanswered.
We know the Watch will be available in three versions - the standard Apple Watch, Watch Sport and the luxury Watch Edition, in two sizes (38mm and 44mm) and with an option of interchangable straps. Apple opened up its WatchKit developers' software last November, allowing third party developers to submit their apps to Apple for approval and hopefully eventual use on the finished platform. So what are the burning questions we're hoping next Monday will answer?
1. How long will the battery last?
Cook has said several times since the launch event that the Watch's battery will last an entire day, leaving the wearer to charge it nightly as they would a smartphone. But, Cook told the Telegraph, it will charge more quickly than an iPhone, and will use an "incredible" magnetic charger designed by Jony Ive. Recently announced rival the Pebble Time Steel claims to boast a battery life of up to 10 days, meaning battery life will be a key point on contention upon decided which smartwatch to invest in.
2. How much will it cost in the UK?
We know the devices will retail in the US from $349 (£230), we don't know which of the three models will be the entry-level device. Given that the luxury Edition is made from a choice of 18-carat rose or yellow gold, the price could theoretically run into thousands of pounds, putting it on par with some of the iMacs.
3. When will it go on sale?
Cook first confirmed the Watch was scheduled to go on sale in April during a call with analysts around the company's record-breaking financial results in late January. A specific date has yet to be revealed, but it is likely to be between two and three weeks after the March 9 event, making it probable early April. Previously, Apple had set the vague retail date of 'early 2015'.

4. Where can I buy one?
It's unlikely the Apple Watch will be sold through external mobile network outlets in the same way the iPhones are. Rumours site 9to5Mac claims to have obtained a retail sales pitch for how the Watch should be sold by Apple Store staff, including asking the questions “What interests you the most about Apple Watch?” and “How do you see yourself using it?” Under the direction of senior vice president of retail Angela Ahrendts, it's possible the Watch may be stocked by high-end timepiece and jewellery chains in the vein of Tiffany's.
5. How will Apple Pay work on it?
The company's mobile payments system Apple Pay was discussed during the same event as the Watch, but was geared primarily towards use on iPhones in the US. It works through an inbuilt near-field communication (NFC) chip in conjunction with the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus' fingerprint sensor to authenticate a purchase. While the Apple Watch has an NFC chip, it doesn't have a fingerprint sensor.
Apple are reported to be recruiting a Pay team based in London, suggesting work is in process to bring the service to the UK. It's possible the Watch could employ a form of code system to verify identity.

6. Which apps will it run?
We already know about the apps mentioned during the launch; namely Activity and Workout - both fitness apps designed to three separate aspects of movement: calories burned, brisk activity and how often you stand up during the day, alongside setting targets and pacing during workout sessions. Read a summary of the apps we'd like to see at launch here.
7. Why should I buy one?
“We’re still waiting to be told why we really need a smartwatch, and that applies to Apple as much as its challengers," CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood has said. "If the Apple Watch fails, it’ll set the smartwatch industry back years.” Wood's not wrong - smartwatches lack the immediate function of a phone, and while models such as Pebble's have proved enormously popular (selling more than a million units within two years), the product is yet to 'break' the mainstream as such. Whether next Monday will change all that remains to be seen.

Pentagon to focus more on hack-proofing weapons

Cyber attacks on U.S. weapons programs and manufacturers are a "pervasive" problem that requires greater attention, the top U.S. arms buyer said Thursday, saying that he would add cybersecurity to the Pentagon's guidelines for buying weapons.

"It's about the security of our weapons systems themselves and everything that touches them. It's a pervasive problem and I think we have to pay a lot more attention to it," Defense Undersecretary Frank Kendall told Reuters after a speech to the American Society of Naval Engineers in Washington.

Kendall said he planned to add cybersecurity to the next phase of his "better buying power" initiative, and was also working on a special section on cybersecurity requirements to be added to the Pentagon's guidelines for buying weapons.

President Barack Obama's fiscal 2016 budget proposal requested $14 billion for cybersecurity efforts to better protect federal and private networks from hacking threats, including $5.5 billion for the Pentagon alone.

The Defense Department's chief weapons tester told Congress in January that nearly every U.S. weapons program showed "significant vulnerabilities" to cyber attacks, including misconfigured, unpatched and outdated software.

Kendall echoed those concerns on Thursday and said he was trying to raise awareness about what he described as a "big problem" that affected the Pentagon and all layers of industry, including the larger supply chain involved in weapons systems.

Increased funding and focus on cybersecurity could result in more work for Lockheed Martin Corp, General Dynamics Corp and other firms that already play a big role in cybersecurity, encryption and analysis for government agencies.

Kendall said some measures had already been adopted to defend U.S. weapons systems and the companies that build them against escalating cyber attacks, but more work was needed.

In January, when Kendall released the latest version of the Pentagon's acquisition guidelines, called Department of Defense Instruction 5000.02, he said he had started work on a new section to deal with designing for and managing cybersecurity.

National Security Agency Director Admiral Mike Rogers told a House Armed Services Committee subcommittee on Wednesday that the Pentagon needed a new approach that allowed rapid, recurring updates to cyber protections for weapons, rather than locking in designs five to 10 years before they were fielded.

Kendall told the conference that the latest version of his Better Buying Power initiative would be released later this month. It too will include a section on cybersecurity, he said.

UK Firm Develops Search Engine For Dark Web

Digital Shadows claims its search engine is the most comprehensive to date - but why develop it in the first place?

The dark net and the deep web are sometimes called the parts of the internet that you cannot Google. But a British cyber security firm has developed its own search engine for both, as well as for IRC (basically, chatrooms).

Alistair Paterson, CEO of Digital Shadows, demos the tech in the corner room of his company’s 42nd-floor office in Canary Wharf. “Basically, it’s a Google for Tor,” he explains.

There are similar efforts. DARPA, the experimental labs of the US Department of Defence, is developing something called Memex and there is Flashpoint, which focuses on extremism on the dark web. There is also Grams, which indexes dark web marketplaces.

But Mr Paterson says his search engine is the most comprehensive to date. He types in 'money laundering' and it instantly returns 2,603 results, displayed just like a Google page except each page also gets a thumbnail screenshot alongside.

One result is a page called "Money Laundering and You-an Introduction", and you can see comments left in the chat forum ("When tumbling BTC, use Helix"). Mr Paterson enters another term, "AK-47", and gets 2,533 results.

Mr Paterson says the search engine "sucks in pages in real time and analyses them. We have some analysts direction. It’s helpful we have two Russian speakers as well. So the system is running all the time, but it’s directed by humans."

Why search the dark web? Digital Shadows is not trying to run down drug or arms dealers and unmask them. Instead, it is protecting companies.

In one instance, the system automatically found a bank employee who was offering customers’ log in details for online banking for £50 a pop. Digital Shadows took that information to the bank, which tracked down the employee.

A company’s digital footprint now extends far further than its servers. It includes employees' social media accounts, contractors’ websites, internet-connected devices like cars, and so on.

Digital Shadows tries to monitor all of these. The dark web is just another source.

That sort of proactive approach to cyber security is becoming more common.

The old mentality in cyber security was not too far away from hiding behind the walls of a castle, repairing the original breach.

The new generation of cyber security companies actively manage threats, whether inside the network, like the Mike Lynch-backed start up Darktrace, or looking out from the walls like Digital Shadows.

Peugeot's blue-chip index comeback spurs recovery

PSA Peugeot Citroen will return to France's benchmark CAC-40 index, stock market operator Euronext said on Thursday, delivering a likely boost to the French carmaker as it emerges from a prolonged European sales slump and bailout.

Peugeot will replace Gemalto, which had already been identified as a possible exit candidate before reports last month that millions of its mobile phone SIM cards had been hacked by U.S. and British intelligence.

CAC-40 re-entry could boost Peugeot's shares - up 49 percent so far this year - by triggering automatic buying on behalf of exchange-traded and tracker funds.

It may also further increase liquidity and put the carmaker firmly back on the radar for foreign investors - as well signalling to customers, staff and competitors that the company's turnaround strategy is gaining traction.

"Returning to the CAC-40 will increase our international exposure, which is an important part of the plan," Peugeot spokesman Bertrand Blaise said.

Spiralling losses led Peugeot to a 3 billion euro ($3.31 billion) bailout last year, in which the French government and Chinese state-controlled carmaker Dongfeng took matching 14 percent stakes in the Paris-based company.

New Chief Executive Carlos Tavares, appointed during the bailout negotiations, has since begun cutting inventory, production costs and the group's model lineup in pursuit of a 2 percent operating margin by 2018.

Gemalto's CAC-40 exit and Peugeot's return, after a two-and-a-half-year absence, will take effect on March 23, Euronext said. Index membership decisions reflect the size of a company's free-floating market capitalisation and trading volumes.

Peugeot shares closed 2.9 percent higher in Paris ahead of the announcement, with Gemalto down 2.6 percent. ($1 = 0.9069 euros)

For the 'unbanked', mobile money still has some way to go

Globally, an estimated 2.5 billion people don't have a bank account, but many own a cellphone, fuelling a race to turn these phones into bank books for the 'unbanked' to store cash, manage their accounts, make purchases and send and receive money - part of so-called 'financial inclusion'.

In a report this week, the GSMA, the association of mobile phone companies, said mobile money "has been growing at a dizzying rate." The Boston Consulting Group said last month mobile money transfers in sub-Saharan Africa alone could generate fees of up to $1.5 billion by 2019.

However, consultants and others working at banks, government agencies and even the phone companies note that, while many people have mobile money accounts - usually with the phone companies - few are actively used. While money flows through these networks, nearly two thirds of the volume comes from users merely topping up prepaid mobile accounts in transactions averaging less than a dollar.

"If you take out air-time, you have a true view of mobile money, and it's not a good story, more than a decade on," says South Africa-based Johan de Lange, who works with banks and phone companies.

And, when people do make remittances, those receiving the money tend to cash it in, taking the money out of the system and limiting the potential for mobile money to become a medium of exchange - a mobile wallet for buying things or to provide banking services over mobile networks.

A GSMA spokesperson said air-time top-ups were decreasing as a proportion of overall transactions, and domestic money transfers via mobile were cheaper or safer than other options, and so were "a key piece of the financial inclusion story."

POLICE PAY

Use of mobile money, indeed, is spreading and there are success stories, but these are few relative to the number of projects, and consultants and others question just how successful they are.

In Afghanistan, for example, much has been made of a service to send police salaries direct to their cellphones via a code they present to an agent or bank for cash. This has reduced corruption, where police pay was often halved as it made its way through the bureaucratic chain.

But the service last year reached less than 1 percent of the police force, and cost the Law and Order Trust Fund For Afghanistan more than $10 per transaction - much of which goes to Roshan, the phone company which runs the service with Vodafone. The fund said last year it was exploring cheaper options.

The poster child for telco-driven mobile money services is M-Pesa, set up by Vodafone and run by Kenya's Safaricom Ltd . Mobile money accounts for more than a fifth of its 145 billion shillings ($1.59 billion) annual revenue.

Daniel Maison, a consultant in Kenya, uses M-Pesa to buy petrol, pay restaurant bills or shop at the supermarket. "It's a part of our lives. We wonder what we did without it. I don't need to physically have cash. The beauty is you can even have a savings account on your mobile phone," he told Reuters.

But some note the M-Pesa service owed much of its take-off to the electoral violence in 2007-08 that displaced many Kenyans and made it hard for others to travel. Sending money by phone was the next best thing. Consultants also say the company's figures hide the fact that mobile money transactions involve sending notifications via short service message (SMS), a cost the operator effectively subsidises.

"If everyone had to pay for these messages, I wonder how many (telco) 'rock stars' there would be," said Malcolm Vernon, a London-based mobile money consultant who works in Africa, Asia and Europe.

TAKING WING

This is not to say that mobile money has no future in emerging markets.

After six years, Wing in Cambodia made a modest profit last year with fewer than 50,000 active accounts, many of them held by farmers and shopkeepers paying their suppliers remotely.

Anthony Perkins, CEO of Wing, once part of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, says the secret is to think more like a bank than a phone company, such as nurturing a network of agents who can receive and dispense cash. Some of these 'human ATMs' can earn eight times the average national income.

"Running an agent network is really no different than running a branch network," Perkins said.

He and others say that while phone companies, with their reach and flexibility, are good tools for rolling out networks, they aren't necessarily the best to move mobile money beyond simple transactions into becoming a nationwide, or international, digital money system.

The telcos' main priorities, they point out, aren't so much the social goals of financial inclusion, but to reduce churn - keeping customers from jumping to a rival firm - and to maximise the amount users spend on their network.

"I don't understand why it's being left to telcos to bring this financial inclusion to the masses," said Perkins. "Even in a small country like Cambodia you can make money out of this."

Gates Foundation makes its biggest-ever equity investment in German biotech

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said it would invest $52 million in CureVac, a German biotechnology company that develops vaccines and immunotherapies, marking the foundation's biggest-ever equity investment.

Privately held CureVac uses its proprietary mRNA technology, which allows for rapid low-cost production of drugs and vaccines, to teach the human body to produce proteins capable of fighting a wide range of diseases.

The investment will support development of CureVac's technology and the construction of a production facility. CureVac and the foundation will also collaborate to develop vaccines to fight infectious disease.

"This collaboration will ensure that one of medicine's most promising new technologies is applied to the challenge of reaching all people with the affordable, life-saving vaccines they need," said Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The foundation will also fund multiple projects developing vaccines for viral, bacterial and parasitic infectious diseases that disproportionately affect people in the world's poorest countries, apart from the equity investment.

As part of the deal, any Gates Foundation-funded products will be made available by CureVac at affordable prices in poor countries.

Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft Corp , and wife Melinda set up the Gates Foundation to fight disease and poverty around the world.

Established in 2000, the foundation distributed $3.6 billion in grants in 2013, in particular for global health and development, and had $42.3 billion in assets as of late 2014.