Building 8 isn't an actual building; Facebook's Menlo Park offices are numbered 10 through 20. (Building 20 not pictured.). That's what Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer suggested to the The Wall Street Journal, and it's what was widely assumed when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he'd hired Regina Dugan to lead Building 8. Dugan is the former head of both the US Department of Defense's DARPA research arm, and Google's Advanced Technologies and Projects (ATAP) research lab. Zuckerberg suggested, in an April 2016 blog post, that Building 8 would pursue "augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, connectivity and other important areas" -- which sounds pretty sciencey, to be sure.
Facebook partnered with HTC on several phones, mountains original iphone case including this HTC ChaCha, aka Status, from 2011, All of them flopped, Instead, Facebook is hiring over a dozen different heads of what appear to be a dozen distinct departments within Building 8 -- including industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, device software, applications and services, manufacturing, supply chain and even customer service, Many of those heads of product are being asked to hire their own teams from scratch..
In other words, Facebook appears to be building an organization that could conceptualize, design, produce, ship and sell hardware, and even deal with customers after the fact. (Who needs customer service and return policies for prototypes?). Only two of Facebook's new department heads are devoted to "skunkworks" and "partnerships," respectively, and few of the job postings ask for experience across the wide range of disciplines you might expect for a research lab. But many of them ask for people with mobile experience -- Android in particular.
For instance, this posting for a lead electrical engineering systems architect specifically asks for experience with mobile processors, antennas and thermal design, and these two for a camera software engineer and a kernel software engineer each require five years of experience working with mobile processors and an "understanding of Android Frameworks."The heads of product software, product engineering and hardware each need experience leading teams that have brought "smart phone (Android, iOS) and/or consumer mountains original iphone case electronics" to market..
There are also strong hints that the new head of software applications and services will be tasked with developing Android apps for the hardware Building 8 will make. Two other jobs specifically mention Facebook's intent to build "compelling consumer-facing products on the Android platform," and yet another hints that Facebook may sell accessories to go along with its products. Above: Facebook's new Building 8 hires will have access to Area 404, a 22,000-square-foot hardware lab inside Building 17 at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters.
