Did you know about this Facebook hardware product called the Portal which was almost sold off to Amazon? They are shutting it down.
Did you know about this Facebook hardware product called the Portal which was almost sold off to Amazon? They are shutting it down. The Facebook Portal was a highly acclaimed...
1 min readTechnology & AINews Bits
Did you know about this Facebook hardware product called the Portal which was almost sold off to Amazon? They are shutting it down.
The Facebook Portal was a highly acclaimed video-chatting device released in 2018. Its main focus was making it easy to video call people through Messenger or Whatsapp without the need to operate the apps.
It sold well and was loved by those who bought it, particularly women and people over 40. Imagine it being the most seamless way for a 70 year old grandmother and 5 year old child to talk to each other without needed to use a smartphone.
Amazon had a competitor in Echo Show, but it was struggling because no one really wanted to use the Alexa app to call someone. Meta was 2 days from licensing out its technology to Amazon, but decided to go against it and pursue it, since the sales were shooting up during the pandemic.
But recently a decision to discontinue the Portal was made due to executives not seeing a path to it becoming a massive business post-pandemic, and of course with shifting priorities at Meta towards VR and the mataverse.
I never even knew about this, I wonder how many other such products exist that came and went right under our nose. 😅
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