KRASIA - Feb 26 - Bengaluru-based social media platform ShareChat, which also operates short-video app Moj, is looking to land a check of $200M from Chinese technology major Tencent. The funding will be raised through optionally convertible debentures and routed via a Europe-based entity. Optionally convertible debentures are long-term debt instruments that can be converted into shares of equity stock after a specified period. If the transaction goes through, it could subsequently lead to a change in management control of ShareChat. The startup claims to have 160 million active users on its main social networking app and 80 million on its short-video app, Moj.
ShareChat Eyes a $200M Round From Tencent
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TikTok Agrees to Pay $92M to Settle Lawsuit Towards Its App
BUSINESSWIRE - Feb 26 - The law firms of Carlson Lynch LLP, FeganScott LLC, and Bird, Marella, Boxer, Wolpert, Nessim, Drooks, Lincenberg & Rhow, P.C. moved for preliminary approval of a $92M proposed class action settlement on behalf of users of the TikTok app. The settlement, if approved by the court, would resolve claims that the social media company wrongfully collected its users' biometric information and private data, and disclosed that information to third parties. In addition to creating a monetary fund for TikTok users, the settlement requires that TikTok initiate a new privacy compliance training program and take other steps to protect its users' privacy going forward.
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Disposables, the Future of Photo Sharing
NEW YORK TIMES - Feb 26 - Dispo, a new photo-sharing app that mimics the experience of using a disposable camera, is taking off. The app is founded by David Dobrik, a YouTube star. In the app, users frame photographs through a small rectangular viewfinder. There are no editing tools or captions. Multiple people can take photos on the same roll, as might happen. Though Dispo's latest version has only been available to the public for less than a week, the app climbed the ranks in Apple's App Store this week. Dispo has already begun expanding internationally, especially in Japan, where the company plans to open an office. In a seed funding round in October, led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian's firm Seven Seven Six, Dispo raised $4M. This week, the company raised $20M at a $200M valuation in a Series A funding round led by Spark Capital. Dispo has also held talks with other major venture firms, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Benchmark.
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TikTok Removed ~350k Videos Related to Election Misinformation
CNET - Feb 26 - TikTok removed a total of 347,225 videos from the platform and made an additional 441,028 videos ineligible for the recommendation on the For You page in the US for violating rules on election misinformation or manipulated media in the second half-year. TikTok prepared for more domestic efforts to influence the 2020 election based on trends it had observed on the spread of misleading information. It said its partnerships with fact-checkers allowed it to verify how accurate videos posted to it are, as well as limit the distribution of those containing "unsubstantiated content".
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Ashley Whillans - Reclaiming Time, Living a Happier Life, and Improving Relationships
LTR - Feb 25 - Over 80% of working adults report feeling "time poor." The added stress of feeling like there is not enough time in the day to accomplish necessary tasks has had negative impacts on health and social relationships. Ashley Whillans, Assistant Professor in Negotiations, Organizations, and Markets at Harvard Business School discusses the importance of making smart decisions to balance time and money. According to research, the detrimental effects of time poverty surpass those of unemployment. The pandemic and working from home have increased the daily workload and aggravates the problem. Professor Ashley Whillans provides several proven strategies to reclaim time to live a happier life in the latest video in the LTR Webinar series.
LTR stands for Love, Technology, Relationships and the online conference covers the Internet dating and Online Social Communities space. It is for members of IDEA and OSCA.
The November LTR was kindly sponsored by RealMe, vPaaS by The Meet Group & Utopia Analytics.
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"LinkedIn for Creatives" Vampr Raises Further £570k Ahead of Series A
VERDICT.CO.UK - Feb 25 - Professional social networking app Vampr has raised a further £570k ahead of an upcoming Series A funding round, bringing its total funding raised to £1.9M. Founded in 2015 by musician and tech entrepreneur Baz Palmer and The Music Network's 30 Under 30 Power Player Josh Simons, the platform helps creatives find people to collaborate with, create new music and monetize their work. Dubbed "Linkedin for creatives", Vampr has built up a network of ~750k people, providing users with tools for distribution, publishing, and education. In the past year, its MAU grew by 400% and it has experienced a 1,273% increase in revenue. It has also expanded its teams in its Nashville and London offices. The funding will go towards further expansion with a new live streaming tool to allow creatives to broadcast their performances. Investors in the platform include music industry executives at Warner, Sony, and Beatport, institutional investors, and National Hockey League players.
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Francisco Partners Is Acquiring MyHeritage for $600M
TECH CRUNCH - Feb 25 - Israel's MyHeritage.com - a profitable site that lets people test DNA and track their family lineage and has some 62M users - is getting acquired by Francisco Partners, for $600M. The deal will be announced officially very soon. MyHeritage - which is available in 42 languages - also has a database of some 13B historical records. Users have built and expanded on some 58M family trees on its platform. It's also run ~5 M DNA tests for its users. Part of the deal will see some individual and institutional investors continuing to keep stakes in the company alongside Francisco Partners. They include HP Beteiligungs GmbH, Yuval Rakavy, Japhet, and Gigi Levy.
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Clubhouse Confirms Data Spillage of Its Audio Streams
BBC - Feb 25 - US cyber-security researchers said a Clubhouse user found a way to stream feeds from multiple chatrooms. Clubhouse confirmed the spill, which is when data is released to a place that is not authorized to have access to it. The firm said that it had banned the user and installed new "safeguards" to prevent conversations from being streamed again. "This individual's account has been permanently banned from the service and we have added additional safeguards to prevent people from doing this in the future." Program's chief technology officer of Stanford University's Internet Observatory, David Thiel, and Australian cyber-security researcher Robert Potter stressed that the data spill was not malicious or a "hack". By understanding how this worked, the user could connect a Clubhouse API to his website, and essentially "share" his login remotely with anyone on the internet who wanted to listen to the audio chats from the app.
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Reddit Ups Series E Round by Another $116M
TECH CRUNCH - Feb 24 - Reddit, which announced a $250M Series E earlier this month, has added ~$116M to the financing event, upping the round's most recent total to $367M. The document shows that Reddit is aiming to raise up to $500M in this capital raise. The new capital is from "new and existing investors." They offered no specifics on names. The new capital did not come with a new valuation, keeping the platform at its previously-announced valuation of $6B pre-money.
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Ex-MoviePass Chair's Zash to Acquire Singapore Video-Sharing Network Lomotif
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER - Feb 24 - Zash Global Media and Entertainment, co-founded by former MoviePass chairman Ted Farnsworth, has struck a definitive agreement to acquire a majority stake in Lomotif, a Singapore-based video-sharing social networking platform a la TikTok founded in 2014. Zash, which was also founded by early Musical.ly (now TikTok) investor Jaeson Ma and Vincent Butta, who sits on the board of social media platform Triller, operates a social influencer platform and wants to develop "an evolved network of synergetic companies working together to disrupt the media and entertainment industry." The deal will make the company "one of the top global, pure-play video-sharing social networking platforms to be owned by a U.S. publicly-traded company, competing with TikTok and Kuaishou."
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Tagg Is Building Social Network for College Students From the Ground up
RHODE ISLAND INNO - Feb 24 - A new social network called Tagg aims to solve problems encountered by freshmen and transfer students in integrating into campus life. Tagg, which is currently being rolled out exclusively at Brown University. Victor Loolo, the co-founder and CEO, describes Tagg as a "Gen-Z love child" that is like a combination of Tinder, Wikipedia, and Tumblr. Tagg built up a few hundred users within the first 8 days of launch, even with no marketing spend. There is now a waiting list for Brown students, with ~15-20 new people being admitted onto the site each day, and another waitlist of students from Harvard and Cornell, the next two schools Tagg is targeting once the Brown community is sufficiently developed. Loolo said what people like best about Tagg so far is the fact that there are no parents, no advertisers, and no fake accounts on it, making the community more exclusive and genuine.
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Amity Surpasses 10M Active Users Mark, Doubles Down on Social with The Amity Social Cloud
PR WEB - Feb 24 - Amity, the global provider of innovative digital solutions that power social experiences, launched Amity Social Cloud. In this suite, existing modules that power chat, chatbot, and communities are complemented with new components that enable social video, feeds, groups, and profiles. With the release of the updated and extended solution suite, both existing and future customers benefit from a set of plug-and-play tools that help boost user engagement and retention without the hassle of software development. Amity Social Cloud has four plug-and-play modules that are scalable, customizable, and easy to integrate. The Amity Social Cloud is available through all global offices and Amity's authorized partner network. Headquartered in Bangkok, Amity has offices in London, Milan, Amsterdam, and Austin, TX.
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Bolo Indya Launches Live Streaming Feature for Creators
HINDUSTAN TIMES - Feb 23 - Indian homegrown social networking firm Bolo Indya announced the launch of the Bolo Live feature on its platform on Monday. Content creators will be able to engage with their audience through live stream. Bolo Indya has also introduced a real-time gamification feature, which will allow content creators to get rewards based on content quality, density and engagement. They can redeem rewards in the form of cash. Followers can send creators digital gifts a rose for ₹10 to a space rocket worth ₹500. Premium digital gifts worth ₹1,000 are also there. Top fans also stand a chance to receive gifts from the creators.
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Twitter Explored Buying ShareChat and Turning Moj Into a Global TikTok Rival
TECH CRUNCH - Feb 23 - Twitter recently held talks to acquire Indian social media startup ShareChat as the company explored ways to expand its presence in the world's second-largest internet market and build a global rival to TikTok. Twitter offered to but ShareChat for $1.1B and had committed an additional investment of $900M. Twitter had expressed intention to take Moj, a short-form video app that ShareChat owns with 80M users, to international markets and position it as a rival to Chinese app TikTok.
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A Race to Reverse-Engineer Clubhouse Raises Security Concerns
TECH CRUNCH - Feb 23 - Live audio chat app Clubhouse ascends in popularity around the is currently only available on iOS, so some developers set out in a race to create Android, Windows and Mac versions of the service. While these endeavors may not be ill-intentioned, the fact that it takes programmers little effort to reverse-engineer and fork Clubhouse - that is, when developers create new software based on its original code - is sounding an alarm about the app's security. "[Clubhouse] asks a lot of information from users, analyzes those data and even abuses them. Meanwhile, it restricts how people use the app and fails to give them the rights they deserve. To me, this constitutes monopoly or exploitation," said Open Clubhouse's developer nicknamed AiX.
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