PR NEWSWIRE - Dec 31 - Soul App (launched in 2016), a socializing app popular among the generation Z, joined hands with WABC (World of Art Brut Culture, founded in 2010 in Shanghai) Charity Foundation launched this year's "Different Socks Day" Charity Event, bringing the public's attention to mentally challenged groups and conveying the power of love and care from young Soul users. The concept of "Different Socks Day" started in 2016 with WABC's Charity Initiative: each year on December 23, people wear mismatched socks to show their willingness to care for those with autism, brain paralysis, and Downs syndrome, as well as their family. In recent years, "Different Socks Day" has grown to a well-known charity event profoundly because of its proposal of a warm and caring purpose with ground-breaking ways of participation.
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Soul App Collaborates With WABC on "Different Socks Day" Charity
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Community - a Social Network for Mineral and Royalty Owners
PR NEWSWIRE - Dec 30 - MineralAnswers.com (founded in 2019, headquartered in Austin) announced its new social network, Community. Aimed at providing a peer-to-peer as well as a peer-to-expert community for mineral and royalty owners. Community gives MineralAnswers.com users a way to ask questions that can be answered by other owners on the platform who may have experienced, insight, or information on the topic. This is the first social network targeting the energy industry, built on top of MineralAnswers.com's extensive energy regulatory information. MineralAnswers.com started as a free service that uses data from the platform.
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Trump Appeals Ruling That Prevents TikTok Ban
HAVEERU ONLINE - Dec 30 - The US government has appealed a court ruling that prevents the Commerce Department from imposing restrictions on TikTok, which would result in its ban in the United States. On December 7, a Washington court judge suspended an executive order by President Donald Trump's administration to ban TikTok from American for reasons of national security.
by Martin Gray
See full article at Haveeru Online
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VKontakte Reports 50% Increase in Posts This Year
TELECOMPAPER - Dec 29 - Russian social network VKontakte said that the number of messages sent on the network jumped by 50% YOY in 2020. ~15B messages are sent daily by the users. The user base of the social network's call service soared by 22%. The user base of the VK Pay payment service lifted by 50% to 16M.
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Chatroulette Is on the Rise Again With Help From AI
WIRED - Dec 28 - A decade ago, Chatroulette (founded in 2009) was popular before collapsing beneath a torrent of male nudity that repelled users. Now, the app, which randomly pairs strangers for video chats, is getting a second chance, since the pandemic that has restricted in-person social contact and advances in artificial intelligence that help filter the most objectionable images. User traffic has nearly tripled since the start of the year, to 4M monthly unique visitors, the most since early 2016, according to Google Analytics. The AI that's helped keep visitors free of unwanted nudity or masturbation has been a good investment, says Founder and chairman Andrey Ternovskiy.
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TikTok Publishes Rare Insight Into UK Business With $119M Loss
TECHNO SPORTS - Dec 28 - TikTok has recorded a $119.5M loss over 2019 in its U.K. business, driven by costs attributing to advertising and marketing, providing a rare insight into how quickly the app is expanding. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has not provided information about global revenue figures, but U.K. sales amounted to $20M over 2019. Expenses related to sales and marketing came to $109M over the year.
by Aliasgar Ayaz
See full article at Techno Sports
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Facebook Help Another Company to Build a Social Network to Fight off Antitrust Lawsuit
BUSINESS INSIDER - Dec 25 - The Washington Post reported Facebook offered to give other tech companies access to its code through license agreements to help build a rival social media network. Facebook lawyers proposed the idea to state and federal investigators days before they filed major antitrust lawsuits against the company. The US Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general filed lawsuits against Facebook on Dec 9 seeking to break off Instagram and WhatsApp. The suits signal a broader effort by the US to strengthen oversight and regulation over Facebook.
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Fashion Social Network 21 Buttons Exposes User Data
SILICON ANGLE - Dec 25 - 21 Buttons La Plataforma APP S.L., a Spain-based technology startup that offers a fashion social network and clothing shop, has suffered a data breach with the records of its users found exposed online. The data was found on an unsecured Amazon Web Services Inc. S3 cloud storage bucket. It included 50M pieces of data, including social media posts and profiles, invoices, full names, addresses, postal codes, bank details, nation ID numbers, PayPal email addresses, and in some cases the value of sales commission earned through the app. Given the company is based in Spain, it's also bound by the European Union's General Data Privacy Regulation. The fact that it has been informed of the data exposure for more than six weeks and failed to act upon the information could result in its getting fined or facing legal action.
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Yelp Transfers $10M in Cash Reserves to Black-owned Banks
HRDIVE - Dec 25 - Yelp, a crowd-sourced local business review and social networking site deposited $10 million of its cash reserves into three Black-owned banks with a long history of serving their communities, Yelp said. The initiative is part of an overall commitment to supporting the Black community and Black-owned businesses, the company said. A $5 million cash deposit at Broadway Federal Bank will help address the "critical need" of affordable housing for low- to moderate-income communities, Yelp said in the news release. Carver Federal Savings Bank received $2.5 million to advance the bank's mission of supporting Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprises; and Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company received $2.5 million to support small businesses and provide "critical financial literacy," Yelp said.
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Telegram, Nearing 500M Users, to Begin Monetizing the App
TECH CRUNCH - Dec 25 - Instant messaging app Telegram is "approaching" 500 million users and plans to generate revenue starting next year to keep the business afloat, its founder Pavel Durov said. Durov said he has personally bankrolled the seven-year-old business so far, but as the startup scales, he is looking for ways to monetize the instant messaging service. The service, which topped 400M, active users, in April this year, will introduce its own ad platform for public one-to-many channels - "one that is user-friendly, respects the privacy and allows us to cover the costs of server and traffic," he wrote on his Telegram channel. Another way Telegram could monetize its service is through premium stickers with "additional expressive features."
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Russia to Launch Ya Molodets, a TikTok-Like Platform
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE - Dec 25 - Russia's leading media holding, which is controlled by state energy giant Gazprom, will launch an app similar to the video-sharing social network TikTok. Gazprom-Media CEO Alexander Zharov as saying the holding had purchased a service called "Ya Molodets" ("I am great"). Zharov said the app was developed with the support of the Innopraktika foundation, an organization run by Katerina Tikhonova, one of President Vladimir Putin's alleged daughters. The app will support the sharing of short vertical videos, similar to the Chinese social network TikTok.
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Clubhouse Makes Way for Influencers
NEW YORK TIMES - Dec 25 - Clubhouse, an audio-only app that built its name with tech investors before expanding into entertainment, is trying to cultivate its own local celebrities. The app is testing an invite-only "Creator Pilot Program" with more than 40 Clubhouse influencers who represent a new class of online fame. So far, they've been promised regular meetings with one of Clubhouse's founders and early access to special tools designed for power users. Clubhouse, which took off in May and has 600k registered users, lets people join pop-up audio chat rooms.
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IAC Plans to Spin-Off Vimeo as an Independent Company
TECH CRUNCH - Dec 23 - IAC announced that it plans to turn Vimeo into an independent, publicly-traded company. Last month, IAC CEO Joey Levin wrote a letter to shareholders in which he said the holding company had begun contemplating spinning Vimeo off to the shareholders. The announcement notes that this is the eleventh company that IAC has spun off, a process in which it distributes its ownership stake to IAC shareholders.
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'Free Speech' Reddit Clone Voat Says It Will Shut Down on Christmas
THE VERGE - Dec 23 - Voat, an "anti-censorship" alternative social network that's been described as the "alt-right Reddit," is scheduled to shut down on December 25th. Voat co-founder Justin Chastain announced the pending closure, saying the site had run out of money after an investor defaulted on their contract in March. Voat was founded in 2014 and hosted Reddit-like forums with minimal moderation. However, Voat faced chronic funding and technical problems, as well as denial-of-service attacks and an apparent warning from law enforcement about threats made on the site.
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