Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has arrived in the UK on the back of the social network’s recent launch of its new ‘Home’ product to evangelise about the platforms attributes.
This has seen a burst of hyperbole issue forth including the claim that the smartphone newsfeed will be ‘more important than television’ and that Facebook itself is the ‘most engaging platform this planet has ever seen’.
The visit isn’t just about hot air however with Sandberg digging out her passport principally to open a new London based engineering centre, Facebook’s first outwith the US.
Sandberg is also seeking to plug her new book, Lean In, which offers advice to women seeking to balance the demands of work with those of family life – a balancing act which critics point out is made considerably easier when your take home pay is in excess of $30m a year.
Facebook faces a number of challenges going forward following its disastrous stock market flotation; chiefly in recalibrating its business model to cater for mobile users, whose rapid growth has taken the firm unawares.
Sandberg noted: “To say that mobile is important to Facebook is the biggest under-exaggeration of all time. We now have computers in our pockets that are 100 times more powerful than the computer that sent the first man to the moon in the year I was born.”