Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
Clive Thompson / Wired:
YouTube taught its recommendation system how to recognize and demote conspiratorial videos, but organic link-sharing and bot promotion are thwarting its efforts — From flat-earthers to QAnon to Covid quackery, the video giant is awash in misinformation. Can AI keep the lunatic fringe from going viral?
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
Starting Oct. 1, all new source code repositories on GitHub will be named “main” instead of “master” as part the company's effort to abandon non-inclusive terms — All new Git repositories on GitHub will be named “main” instead of “master” starting October 1, 2020.
Sophia Kunthara / Crunchbase News:
At Snowflake's IPO price, Sutter Hill Ventures' stake was worth $5.9B, Altimeter Capital's ~$4.4B, ICONIQ Capital's $4B+, Redpoint's $2.6B, and Sequoia's ~$2.5B — Data warehousing company Snowflake went public on Wednesday in the largest software IPO ever, raising nearly $3.4 billion and valuing the company at $33.2 billion.
Peter Clarke / eeNews Europe:
French startup Antaios raises $11M for developing SOT-MRAM that can potentially replace embedded non-volatile memory and SRAM cache in microprocessors and SoCs — Antaios SA (Grenoble, France), a 2017 startup working on spin-orbit-torque (SOT) MRAM has secured US$11 million in funding.
Tammy Lovell / MobiHealthNews:
Sweden-based Joint Health raises $23M Series B for its app that connects patients with chronic hip and knee pain with physical therapists — Funding will enable the company to expand its app for chronic joint pain to the US and further across Europe. — Swedish firm Joint Academy …
Reuters:
ByteDance says that it is not aware of the news that TikTok is setting up a $5B education fund in the US as part of a deal to continue operating in the US — NINGBO, China (Reuters) - TikTok owner Bytedance said in a social media post on Sunday that it was the first time it had heard …
PYMNTS.com:
LA-based Boosted Commerce, which is building a portfolio of e-commerce brands, raises $87M and announces the acquisition of six Amazon fulfillment companies — As it aims to develop an online shopping portfolio, Boosted Commerce said it has notched $87 million in investment and has purchased six Amazon fulfillment (FBA) firms.
Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch:
US delays TikTok ban by a week, as company says Oracle and Walmart may take 20% stake in TikTok Global's pre-IPO round, host US user data and computer systems — Well... that was pointless. — After debasing the idea of free commerce in the U.S in the name of a misplaced security concern …
Well… that was pointless.
After debasing the idea of free commerce in the U.S in the name of a misplaced security concern, stringing along several multi-billion dollar companies that embarrassed themselves in the interest of naked greed, and demanding that the U.S. government get a cut of the profits, the TikTok saga we’ve been watching the past few weeks finally appears to be over.
A flurry of announcement late Saturday night indicate that the TikTok deal was actually a politically-oriented shakedown to boost the cloud infrastructure business of key supporters of the President of the United States.
Oracle, whose cloud infrastructure services run a laughable fourth to AWS, Alphabet*, and Microsoft, will be taking a 20 percent stake in TikTok alongside partner Walmart in what will be an investment round before TikTok Global (as the new entity will be called) goes public on an American stock exchange.
According to a statement from TikTok, Oracle will become TikTok’s “trusted technology partner” and will be responsible for hosting all U.S. user data and securing associated computer systems to ensure U.S. national security requirements are fully satisfied. “We are currently working with Walmart on a commercial partnership as well,” according to the statement from TikTok.
Meanwhile, Oracle indicated that all the concerns from the White House, U.S. Treasury, and Congress over TikTok had nothing to do with the service’s selection of Oracle as its cloud provider. In its statement, Oracle said that “This technical decision by TikTok was heavily influenced by Zoom’s recent success in moving a large portion of its video conferencing capacity to the Oracle Public Cloud.”
The deal benefits everyone except U.S. consumers and people who have actual security concerns about TikTok’s algorithms and the ways they can be used to influence opinion in the U.S.
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance gets to maintain ownership of the U.S. entity, Oracle gets a huge new cloud customer to boost its ailing business, Walmart gets access to teens to sell stuff, and U.S. customer data is no safer (it’s just now in the hands of U.S. predators instead of foreign ones).
To be clear, data privacy and security is a major concern, but it’s not one that’s a concern when it comes to TikTok necessarily (and besides, the Chinese government has likely already acquired whatever data they want to on U.S. customers).
For many observers, the real concern with TikTok was that the company’s Chinese owners may be pressured by Beijing to manipulate its algorithm to promote or suppress content. Companies in China — including its internet giants — are required to follow the country’s intelligence and cloud security law mandating complete adherence with all government orders for data.
The Commerce Department in its statement said that “In light of recent positive developments, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, at the direction of President Trump, will delay the prohibition of identified transactions pursuant to Executive Order 13942, related to the TikTok mobile application that would have been effective on Sunday, September 20, 2020, until September 27, 2020 at 11:59 p.m.” So that’s a week reprieve.
So all this sound and fury … for what? The best investment return in all of these shenanigans is almost certainly Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz’ investment into Trump, who in addition to being a heavy donor to the Trump administration, also joined the presidential transition committee back in 2016. Thank god the U.S. saved TikTok from the crony capitalism of China. Let’s just hope they enjoy the crony capitalism of Washington DC.
*An earlier version of this article referred to AWS, Amazon and Microsoft. AWS and Amazon are the same company. I was typing fast. I’ve corrected the error.
Fred Pennic / HIT Consultant:
Medigate, a provider of IoT and medical device security and asset management, raises $30M Series B led by Partech, bringing its total raised to $50M — What You Should Know: — Medigate announced $30M in Series B financing to expand its medical and IoT device security solution to ensure patient privacy and safety.
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
In a new filing, Epic rejects Apple's claim that “interest” in Fortnite declined by 70%, says active players grew 39% between October 2019 and July 2020 — Epic is hitting back at Apple's claims that the developer's lawsuit was just an attempt to revitalize sagging interest in Fortnite on iOS.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
iOS 14 Picture in Picture functionality stops working for YouTube's mobile website in Safari for users who do not subscribe to YouTube Premium — Apple in iOS 14 added Picture in Picture to the iPhone, a feature designed to let you watch a video in a small screen on your device while you continue to do other things on the phone.
Julia Alexander / The Verge:
Apple's subscription bundle Apple One will greatly help TV+ by keeping subscriber metrics high as the service grows, following a strategy similar to Prime Video — A big push ahead of the streaming service's anniversary — Apple's new Apple One bundle, which gives customers an assortment …
Alex Kantrowitz / Big Technology:
The FTC and DOJ antitrust divisions are underfunded, as current and ex-staffers say tech giants use close personal ties and deep pockets to stymie regulation — U.S. regulators don't have enough money to properly check the tech giants, according to firsthand accounts
A yellow-eyed cat tilts its eyes at the camera, gazing up from a grey bedspread. ‘London Trip’, is the AI’s title for this photo-montage ‘Memory’ plucked from the depths of my iPhone camera-roll. It’s selected a sad score of plinking piano and sweeping violin. The algorithm has calculated it must tug at the heart strings.
Cut to a crop of a desk with a 2FA device resting on a laptop case. It’s not at all photogenic. On to a shot of a sofa in a living room. It’s empty. The camera inclines toward a radio on a sidetable. Should we be worried for the invisible occupant? The staging invites cryptic questions.
Cut to an outdoor scene: A massive tree spreading above a wrought iron park fence. Another overcast day in the city. Beside it an eccentric shock of orange. A piece of public art? A glass-blown installation? There’s no time to investigate or interrogate. The AI is moving on. There’s more data clogging its banks.
Cut to a conference speaker. White, male, besuited, he’s gesticulating against a navy wall stamped with some kind of insignia. The photo is low quality, snapped in haste from the audience, details too fuzzy to pick out. Still, the camera lingers, panning across the tedious vista. A wider angle shows conference signage for something called ‘Health X’. This long distant press event rings a dim bell. Another unlovely crop: My voice recorder beside a brick wall next to an iced coffee. I guess I’m working from a coffee shop.
On we go. A snap through a window-frame of a well kept garden, a bird-bath sprouting from low bushes. Another shot of the shrubbery shows a ladder laid out along a brick wall. I think it looks like a church garden in Southwark but I honestly can’t tell. No matter. The AI has lost interest. Now it’s obsessing over a billboard of a Google Play ad: “All the tracks you own and millions more to discover — Try it now for free,” the text reads above a weathered JCDecaux brand stamp.
There’s no time to consider what any of this means because suddenly it’s nighttime. It must be; my bedside lamp is lit. Or is it? Now we’re back on the living room sofa with daylight and a book called ‘Nikolski’ (which is also, as it happens, about separation and connection and random artefacts — although its artful narrative succeeds in serendipity).
Cut to a handful of berries in a cup. Cut to an exotic-looking wallflower which I know grows in the neighbourhood. The score is really soaring now. A lilting female vocal lands on cue to accompany a solitary selfie.
I am looking unimpressed. I have so many questions.
The AI isn’t quite finished. For the finale: A poorly framed crop of a garden fence and a patio of pot plants, washing weeping behind the foliage. The music is fading, the machine is almost done constructing its London trip. The last shot gets thrust into view: Someone’s hand clasping a half-drunk punch.
Go home algorithm, you’re drunk.
My iPhone has invented a 2014 'London trip' that wasn't. It calls this absurd & creepy construct "a new memory" – trying to pass off its weird fiction as my own. Do algorithms dream in camerarolls? More importantly, when & where did we agree to surveillance by lying AIs?
— Natasha
(@riptari) September 17, 2020
Footnote: Apple says on-device machine learning powers iOS’ “intelligent photos experience” which “analyzes every photo in a user’s photo library using on-device machine learning [to] deliver a personalized experience for each user” — with the advanced processing slated to include scene classification, composition analysis, people and pets identification, quality analysis and identification of facial expressions
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
In this series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.
At Apple’s hardware event this week, the company announced a new Apple Watch Series 6, an Apple Watch SE, an eighth-generation iPad and a new iPad Air, among other things.
But the bigger news for app makers was the surprise release of iOS 14. Typically, developers are given a much longer heads-up and at least have the updated version of their developer tools well before the actual iOS launch day. This year, however, Apple shocked app developers with an announcement during its live event that its new software platforms, iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7 and tvOS 14, would arrive in less than 24 hours.
The move was a low blow from Apple at a time when its developer community was already feeling disrespected by Apple’s tougher stance on the use of in-app purchases and increase in capricious app rejections, not to mention the language Apple used to describe their contributions to iPhone’s success in Apple’s lawsuit with Epic Games.
But now iOS 14 is here, and with it comes a radical change to how apps are presented and used on iPhone.
App Clips will allow users to launch “mini app” experiences when a full app download isn’t needed, like in the case of needing to pay at a parking meter using a native app. Widgets will allow developers to increase their presence on the home screen, potentially increasing their importance to their most loyal users. But on the flip side, infrequently used apps may now be abandoned in the new App Library.
Any app that doesn’t get a home screen spot in the new version of iOS either as an app icon or widget may soon find that its MAUs and DAUs decline after users upgrade to iOS 14.
Being relegated to the App Library is the equivalent of being stuck inside a folder on the back screen — out of sight and forgotten. App developers who suspect they haven’t made the cut in the big iOS redesign will need to make clever use of push notifications to rekindle their relationship with users. But this, too, is a fine line. Too many notifications or pushing low-value notifications will see users turning to other iOS tools — like the option to easily silence or switch off notifications entirely for the app in question. And then, without any visibility or a way to connect, the app will be truly forgotten.
Apple also challenged the entire fitness app industry with its launch of a Fitness+ subscription service. Wall Street investors weren’t too worried about the long-term potential impact to top brands, like Peloton and Fitbit. But these companies are not necessarily representative of the smaller fitness app maker. For $10 per month or just $80 per year, Apple is offering a home gym membership of sorts, with deep integrations with Apple Watch. Fitness+ offers workouts and instructions set to music that can be used across Apple devices. Because it’s from Apple, the workouts will also correctly sync to the Apple Watch for accurate recording of various workout metrics, like calories burned, pace or distance, for example.
The service is also being bundled in Apple’s new Apple One subscription in the upper tier, which may appeal to Apple’s current subscribers looking to save money by paying for an all-in-one service instead of individual apps. And what could a fitness app maker do to compete with this? Or a music app, for that matter? Third-parties don’t typically have the option to get bundled into a high-value package alongside other top apps from unrelated industries, unless the company goes out and forges those deals itself — like Spotify once did with Hulu.
Given that Apple is still being investigated over antitrust issues, it’s rather bold to launch a bundle deal like this while continuing to commission its competitors — rivals who have no other means of reaching iPhone’s audience outside the App Store.
Another new Apple service puts family tracking apps on notice. Though apps like Life360 have become must-have tools in the helicopter parent era, Apple’s new Family Setup aims to transform the kid-tracking industry by taking a different tactic: it’s for families who aren’t buying kids an iPhone just yet. Instead, Apple will lure new customers by making its Apple Watch — and specifically, the more affordable Apple Watch SE — kids’ first Apple device.
Kids get to use Apple Watch’s key features, like Emergency SOS, Maps, Siri, Alarms, Memoji, Apple Pay, and more, while parents get to restrict who the child can call or text. By the time the child upgrades to iPhone and the wider world of apps that comes with it, families may see no need for a third-party alternative for family safety. That means kid trackers will need to upgrade their offerings to include features that Apple doesn’t, like Life360 does with its driving features, like crash detection or weekly driver reports, for instance.
There is nothing straightforward about the TikTok ban. Like much of the Executive Order activity coming from the current administration, a broad order is issued but the details are left to be worked out on the fly, leading to chaos.
In the case of the TikTok deal and the app’s potential ban in the U.S., at the beginning of this week we learned China would rather see TikTok banned than forced into a sale, and that neither Oracle nor Microsoft would get to acquire TikTok’s U.S. business. Microsoft was said to have apparently pissed off TikTok owner ByteDance by calling the app a security risk and was cut out of the deal. Later in the week, Oracle put out a press release saying it would be the technology partner for TikTok, and Walmart separately claimed to still be involved.
Oh, and it seems Instagram founder and former CEO Kevin Systrom was approached for the TikTok CEO job at one point. Lord.
So what’s happening now? The U.S. government and ByteDance continue to negotiate on specific terms. As of late, the U.S. wants Oracle to agree to review TikTok source code for backdoors, ByteDance to create a new organization for its U.S. operations with a board approved by the U.S. government and for there to be a license agreement for TikTok’s algorithms. As TechCrunch reported, these terms beg the question as to how TikTok could possibly continue to refine its algorithms in real time without access to U.S. TikTok user data, or when it has to rebuild its infrastructure on Oracle, separated from a core product being developed elsewhere. But nevertheless, reports claim ByteDance has agreed to the government’s terms and also plans to IPO TikTok’s global business.
On Friday, the Commerce Dept. announced the details of how it plans to enforce a shutdown, saying that both TikTok and WeChat, the other Chinese app impacted by the ban, would no longer be distributed on U.S. app stores as of September 20. But TikTok gets an extension that allows it to still operate until November 12 as the parties attempt to hammer out the complicated deal. That deadline means the app will continue to work through the U.S. elections, based on how the terms are spelled out now. But those could change at any time, given the chaotic nature of how this potential ban has progressed so far.
Despite being one of TikTok’s chief rivals, Instagram — which recently copied TikTok with its own feature, Reels — has come out against the ban. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said a U.S. ban of the app would be bad for the internet more broadly, including companies like Facebook and Instagram. TikTok interim CEO Vanessa Pappas then publicly asked him for help with its litigation.
By the time you read this, several more updates about the TikTok deal may have been released. Stay tuned.
Aviary
Image Credits: Aviary (widget shown in top right)
Aviary’s recently launched Twitter app ($4.99) is ready for iOS 14, with home screen widgets and support for multiple columns on iPad.
Color Widgets
Image Credits: Color Widgets
A simple app is No. 1 on the (non-game) App Store because, clearly, iOS users were ready for widgets. The Color Widgets app lets you pick a color, font and theme for a basic widget that displays the date, day of the week, time and battery level. Isn’t that pretty?
