This Gillmor Gang episode is as much about what we didn’t talk about as what we did. In the run up to the recording session, we somehow suspected we’d talk about Apple’s virtual event on Tuesday. Then, 15 minutes after we finished, RBG lost her battle to keep the Supreme Court from tipping even further to the right. With barely 7 weeks to the election, things changed.

Apple’s event focused on two product announcements — a next gen Apple Watch and an iPad Air refresh. Also bill boarded was the software side of Apple’s bundling of their services into a super package missing the next iPhone as the flagship hardware that sits on top. In fact, it also has the effect of bundling the Watch, the phone, the tablet, the AirPods, and even the AppleTV as a suite of services connected via wrist, ears, and eyes. Come to think of it, that really was something to talk about. But instead, two weeks before the climactic debates, our thoughts turned to handicapping where we’ll be by the time Apple actually ships the next wave of iPhones for the holidays.

The pandemic has altered our perspective in so many ways, but one key shift is the slow yet steady realization that waiting for the new normal is missing what is already staring us in the face. Yes, we’re champing at the bit to enjoy the weekend as though it was a separate thing. We celebrate our religious holidays as though they are a Zoom version of snow days. Next year in Jerusalem becomes how about a movie night out.

In that context a new iPhone delayed by two months is just about right. Besides, how much does 5G really matter when we’re stuck at home? The Hollywood production lockdown has caught up with the binge jockeys we’ve become. Old style broadcast TV is already caught in a vise between those of us who are sick of waiting through a summer of Big Brother to solve cliffhangers we could honestly care less about. We already have too many cliffhangers in real life — the election, the post-election, the vaccines, whether anybody will take them, oh yeah, the economy, not who’s in the SuperBowl but whether there’s a SuperBowl.

So Apple should have been something to talk about. Instead, it’s Tik Tok, which is OK because at least it’s about the kids and what they are up to. Our children have way more reality on their shoulders then they or we expected. The good news may be that they’re handling brutal college transitions and the testing of friendships pretty well. Harder is the family of vulnerable intermingling with the watch party crowd, parents struggling to protect their brood without benefit of even a sympathetic hug or twenty. Instead, it’s the kids trying to reassure us that it will be OK.

And now there’s RBG for the ages, and AOC to warn us not to stay home in November. Who knows whether it will work or not, but Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the Representative from Brooklyn are bookends on the corner turn we sit at in American history. The Tik Tok struggle may be seen in terms of the current administration, or a marker laid down in what social media 2.0 wil look like. Reality TV may be being obsoleted by a generation that spans boomers and snapchatters, where watch parties spring up to meet the demands of realtime.

Watch parties seem stuck in an older age of drive-ins and soda jerks. But look closer and signals emerge. Last week Facebook added a picture in picture feature to watch parties (not to be confused with Facebook Watch, or Apple Watch for that matter.) PiP puts you into a just in time mode where comments and tweets can blend a back channel to the show participants with group dynamics of the audience. It also combines the feel of podcasting with the fundamentals of the newsletter architecture. Watching how the candidates are battling the virus with undecided voters is now being virtualized. The important news is that we will see a decision shortly.

JFK showed the world how TV worked, not just in the debates with Nixon, but in his press conferences, a mashup of humor, political savvy, and an exciting confidence the Beatles picked up and ran with. “But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked,” Bob Dylan intoned. Now we’ll find out.

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, September 18, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

This may be counterintuitive. I hope so. I remember the day I first started using Twitter. My friend Gabe Rivera suggested it would be a good idea to sign on to the fledgling network. Basically it was a land grab — claim the real estate of my name. I most likely was aware of the fundamentals of the new service, but wary of actually making some sort of overt splash. Why would I want to, as the frame of the day went, announce what I was having for lunch?

But I knew Gabe was right; I should get in line for the day it became clearer what good this was for. As Professor Irwin Corey would say Adam first said to Eve: stand back, I don’t know how big this is going to get. So I did, and sat back for almost a year. Eventually some thread caught my eye, or my ego encouraged me to think somebody might be interested in what I was having for lunch. That led to a series of discoveries we all made about how this thing might work, if it could just not crash from its unscalable neo-scalable scripting language roots.

One of the most interesting things to do in those early days was to misuse the network for creative purposes. If the logic of posting was to deliver meaningful content that would be of interest to larger audiences, we knew where that was headed. Celebrities, verified accounts, a triple A version of the big leagues of mainstream media.Logical maybe, but not what I was interested in. To the contrary, I relished the exact opposite, an experience where the result was something other than what we already had. One trick I had was to talk conversationally to the tiny audience of those I was pinging with their username.

This may or may not have predated the @mention, but the intent was to send a message to someone who was notified of the attempt by a notification. Alternatively, following a small but targeted series of accounts created a stream of posts from people who shared some implicit common interests. Either way, eventually these @mention clouds became a rich source and object of breaking news, jokes, and a stew of social energy. I enjoyed the occasional response, and would reply in place as though I was having a private chat. The theory went: if this annoyed people, they would unfollow me and be happier for it. Many did, and were.

Skipping ahead to now, I still use Twitter in this way for the most part. I set my notification stream to display a subset of my follows, first around 50, then 100, now upwards of 4 or 500. It is annoyingly disruptive of the top of my screen; reading an ebook book is an intermittent experience at certain hours waiting for the stream to slow down when I’m trying to read the first couple of lines of a page. But what I get is an almost subliminal collage of random stuff from a not-so-random group of what reminds me of a coffee house circle of friends in college days. The major news media breaks through repetitively when someone dies or succeeds, but also there are the mutterings of entrepreneurs and thought leaders, captains of industry who relish the direct channel, politicians of the digital underground, comedians, culture cowboys and cowgirls, right, left, and centrist.

It’s a living breathing thing, and it’s different from everything else. Facebook is what you think of it, but I’m sadly grateful for its function as the glue between family, friends, and a shared personal history. Never mind that it’s impossible to find something once it flits by. I hate it yet appreciate it nonetheless. But Twitter is an imperfect pacemaker in my chest, beating with the pulse of the nation, the notifications starting in Europe, then the East Coast, finally the Valley and Hollywood before I get sidetracked by reality and over the hill to the next day.

As Michael Markman quotes Jerry Seinfeld on this Gillmor Gang episode, “It’s never in the bag, and you’re never out of the running.” Yes, Trump dominates the service, and every other network as we careen toward the election. Twitter fills in some of the pandemic’s gaps in traditional campaigning. Some are good with Twitter; some are not. But when the shouting’s over and the ballots counted, Trump may or may not be left standing. Twitter surely will. Just don’t call it Shirley.

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, September 11, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Google today announced the Google Meet Series One, a new video conferencing hardware suite for meeting rooms. Built in collaboration with Lenovo, the Series One uses high-end cameras and microphones and then marries them with Google’s AI smarts thanks to using Google’s own Coral M.2 accelerator modules with the company’s Edge TPUs.

Previous Google Meet hardware efforts from companies like ASUS, Acer and Logitech were generally built around a Chromebox. This new effort uses a custom-built compute system at its core and combines that with an almost Google Nest-like tablet-sized screen, a soundbar with eight built-in microphones, additional microphone pods and one of two cameras.

Image Credits: Google

The cameras are maybe the most interesting option here, with the Smart Camera XL features a 20.3-megapixel sensor and 4.3x optical zoom. Thanks to these specs, it can be used as a digital PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) camera. With that, the system can always automatically zoom in to frame everybody in the room and when the next person joins, it can zoom and pan as necessary to make sure everybody is still visible.

The regular Smart Camera can still do most of this, but it doesn’t feature the optical zoom, making it a better solution for smaller rooms. Google partnered with Huddly to develop this camera system (and the two companies also collaborated on previous Meet hardware projects).

But Google also put a lot of effort into the audio system. With its eight beam-forming microphones built into the soundbar and advanced noise cancellation techniques running on Google’s AI chips, the system should be able to filter out most distractions. Companies can add additional soundbars that only feature the speakers and microphones without the AI chips to cover even larger rooms. These additional units only feature the speakers and microphones, without the additional AI hardware since all of the processing needs to be done centrally.

Image Credits: Google

One nice touch here is that the team also made it easy to install these systems thanks to using Power-over-Ethernet. That should make installing one of these systems in a conference room pretty easy.

Since this is Google, it’s probably no surprise that you can also use the Google Assistant on this system, providing you with hands-free control over the room (something that’s maybe more important today than ever before).

The smallest room kit, with the basic Smart Camera but without the tablet-style meeting controller and microphone pod, will retail for $2,699. For $2,999 you get a complete set with one standard camera, soundbar, microphone pod and controller and if you have a very large room, you can opt for the $3,999 version with the additional soundbar, two microphone pods and the Smart Camera XL.

I quite like the iPad Pro 11 inch with the Magic Keyboard. In the Land of Pandemic where every day is Saturday, the tablet is king. With no real purchase on the chaotic flow of life, the rules — any rules — of the road are very dear to me. Structure is arbitrary but mandatory. Strategy is Niagara Falls: slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch. What exactly do I mean?

First, the tablet is a strange beast. Caught between the laptop and the phone, you’d think it would be a constant compromise. It’s not. Each time I add a step to the workflow, it re-cements itself as a coherent whole. In a world ruled by the next notification, context switches are disruptive; handoffs are not. One minute the iPad is a media grazer. The phone rings. Answering it on the Watch frees me from the tether, answering on the iPad offers a click of the phone icon in the upper left to move to the phone.

I know it sounds a bit nuts to explain or even discuss, but add up the iterative improvements of this platform and you achieve some real productivity. Not the enterprise kind, nor the media hacker kind, but the palpable sense of progress in fashioning a place in this new digital world. Slowly but surely I’ve moved process after process to the iPad Pro. Gillmor Gang production, or more precisely editing, mixing, rendering, posting, annotating, testing, now all on the single device.

To begin with, I decided to junk Final Cut Pro as the editing platform, simply because it ran only on the Mac. It’s much more powerful than its replacement, LumaFusion, but once I plug the software into the iPad, it lights up the improved features of iOS 13 and the Files app. The Magic Keyboard peripheral adds a USB connector to plug in an external drive, and while it’s a bit of a trudge to get it to work almost like OS/10, soon it’s easy to move files over from Zoom on the Mac where the camera is positioned better in the center of the display.

I used to doubt Apple would provide remedies tor these weird design gotchas like the camera on the side of the display in landscape mode. The Magic Keyboard doesn’t let you position the iPad in portrait mode, and it wouldn’t work anyway with Zoom in 16:9. But then again the keyboard cases up until the Magic Keyboard don’t support backlit keys. Now the iPad Pro is my main writing tool, its slightly underpowered keyboard winning out over my MacBook Air. The Magic Keyboard is expensive ($300) but Apple’s attention to detail reinforces my commitment to the evolution of the platform.

The Keyboard’s trackpad is similarly goofy in its implementation, sitting uneasily between the touch platform of the screen and the keyboard alts and text editing precision of the Mac. You learn quickly how to navigate between the two worlds, however, intuiting that future implementations should build on the elements of the hybrid that work. I’ve followed the press musings about the future of Mac OS and iOS, but now I’m growing comfortable with the assumption that inexorably the shift in power has tipped over. Perhaps it’s the price performance in the move off of Intel to Apple’s in-house chips.

Or perhaps it’s the feeling that momentum patches problems out of a desire to keep locked in to the process flow of modular apps and services. I’m using Quip to write this, knowing the iPad version doesn’t yet provide a word count feature like the Mac version does. So I went searching for Apple’s bundled Pages app and got the answer. My assumption is that these common services will soon become table stakes.

Beneath the tech veneer, the iPad reminds me of the power of directed evolution. As trivial as a backlit keyboard seems in the overall scheme of things, that Apple knew all along what the blocker was on this platform augurs for the future extensions we know are coming in this Work From Anywhere moment. Not just the big ideas but the little ones, that grow through steady adoption into giants of a shift necessary to contain unexpected catastrophes and minor scrapes of the regular kind. I wasn’t sure why I felt driven to spend so much time unifying my tools and strategies for virtualizing my computing experience. Now that we live full time in this moment, it’s these little things that count.

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, September 4, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook
…and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook

Facebook’s video destination, Facebook Watch, is introducing a new feature called “Your Topics” that will allow you to tailor its feed to include more of the content you want to see. Currently, Facebook leverages its existing understanding of each viewer’s interests to personalize the Watch Feed. Topics, however, will allow users to more explicitly tell Facebook what sort of things they like by exploring and subscribing to various content categories.

The feature has been quietly rolling out to Facebook users in recent days, and now some portion of the user base already has the feature in their own Facebook app.

Among the first to notice the new addition was Twitter user @whimchic, who regularly spots updates and changes to mobile applications before they’re made public.

They were alerted to the feature through a pop-up within Watch on the Facebook mobile app, we’re told. Here, a message explained that Facebook will now focus on showing more of the videos related to the #Topics you follow.

“Due to the many different ways your Watch feed is determined and how videos get categorized, you may see videos in your Watch feed that you aren’t interested in,” the message also warned. “Some videos related to the #Topics or Pages you follow may not appear in your Watch feed,” it noted.

Image Credits: Facebook app, screenshot via @whimchic

If you have the feature, you can access it for yourself by clicking on the Profile icon in the Facebook Watch tab on mobile, then clicking on the link to “Your Topics” to browse the available categories.

The subcategories which you can actually follow or unfollow are grouped underneath broader category pages, like Animals, Art & Design, Books, Business, Education, Fashion & Style, Food, Games, History & Philosophy, Home & Garden, Music, Performing Arts, Science & Tech, Sports, Travel & Leisure, TV & Movies, and Transportation.

Image Credits: Facebook app, screenshot via TechCrunch

However, you can’t follow these high-level categories themselves — you have to click inside them to follow the individual topics. These can be very specific. For example, within Animals, you could follow #EndangeredSpecies or #GoldenRetrievers. Within Travel & Leisure, you could follow #TravelOceania or #WinterActivities. And so on.

But the subcategory listings are not comprehensive. Upon testing the feature within the Facebook app on my iPhone, a search for many other possible topics yielded no results. (What, no #Corgi videos?!) This, of course, could change in time as the feature is expanded.

Image Credits: Facebook app, screenshot via TechCrunch

Once you follow a topic, a message will confirm your choice and then the topic will appear under “Topics You Follow” in the Your Topics section of Facebook Watch.

From here, you can choose to unfollow the topic later on if you decide you want to see less of it in your feed. And if you want to watch only videos from a given topic, you can tap the topic to delve into a customized feed.

The feature is now one of several ways users can personalize and filter their broader Facebook Watch feed.

You can also filter the feed by Live, Music, Following, Shows, Gaming and more, by tapping on the buttons at the top of the screen or from the What’s on Watch category picker that shows up as you scroll further down the Watch Feed.

Facebook also adds groupings like its editorially curated “Get Caught Up” section with videos from paid partners, or those groupings that are more algorithmically sorted, like the one with videos that got the most “HaHa’s” or “Loves” this week, or those that are popular with friends.

Image Credits: Facebook app, screenshot via TechCrunch

The new feature could make Facebook Watch more competitive with YouTube, where there’s historically been a heavier focus on connecting users with individual channels to subscribe to. But YouTube has also embraced Topics in its own way, with broad categories like “Gaming” and “Fashion & Beauty” that are now a part of its main navigation. And it puts personalized topics at the top of the home page directing signed-in users to categories of videos they tend to watch.

Twitter, of course, has its own Topics feature, too, which showcases top tweets that match a particular interest. These may or may contain videos, however.

Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed the addition of Topics, saying “we’re working on more ways to connect people with videos that match their interests.” No further details were provided.

Many companies have posted the occasional big quarter. These outsized periods may come when a business sells part of itself, or, through some arcane non-cash financial hijinks, it posts impressive numbers that appear prodigious when compared to their regular operating results. (Like when Uber recorded huge profits in its March 31, 2018 quarter.)

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

And then there’s Zoom, the cloud video comms company that went public in April, 2019. It just turned in a quarter so extraordinary that you might presume it was inflated, or otherwise somehow faux. But what makes Zoom’s Q2 earnings data so damn interesting and impressive is that it appears that the company has managed to just grow more than anyone expected or perhaps thought possible, in less time, while making more money than anticipated.

Re-reading the Zoom results this morning, I can confidently say that I haven’t ever read a more impressive earnings document. Zoom had a strong Q1, but it had a bonkers Q2.

Let’s dig into the numbers to understand what the world’s most impressive COVID-bump looks like.

A monster Q2

At the end of its Q1, Zoom told investors that it expected to generate revenue “between $495.0 million and $500.0 million” in Q2 2020 and “between $1.775 billion and $1.800 billion” for its full fiscal year, which is offset by one month from the calendar year.

Before its Q2 report, investors had expected a bit more, with average estimates for Q2 2020 revenue coming in at $500.5 million. Regarding its fiscal year, analysts expected the company to generate $1.81 billion in revenue.

Much was made during the Republican Convention of the lack of a party platform. The media characterized this as a capitulation to the Cult of Trump phenomenon, but the questioned begged was: so what? If you’re running as a candidate to disrupt the status quo…. But beneath the media framing, an important question emerges. What exactly is the platform we need to emerge from the toxic situation we find ourselves in?

For months, if not years, the technology industry has been working on a new platform to succeed the previous one. Mobile would seem to be that fundamental shift from the desktop world of Windows and PCs. The twin dominance of powerful phones by Google and Apple has created a new language of notifications and streaming video perfectly timed for the devastating pandemic. Our devices are now the front lines for managing the struggle to stay alive for our loved ones, the economy, and our future.

Zoom is of course the poster child for all that it enables, and certainly what it doesn’t. The notion of work from home is more likely a question of what is home and what’s the difference with work? The routines of life are congealing around the interactions with phone, watch, iPad, laptop, and TV. When I wake up, the first dive is for the notification stream built up overnight from overseas and then the East Coast. The rhythm varies from day to day: intense on Monday as the weekend cobwebs dissipate, more issue oriented through the middle of the week, and finally a thank-god-it’s Friday feel. Email, text messages, media updates, and work calendar reminders.

And then there’s the outline of the new platform — live streaming notifications from what some call citizen media, or the influencer network, or the loyal opposition. That last one refers to the decline in trust of the mainstream media. Maybe it’s just me, but the cable model of host-driven cyclical repetition of the headlines, talking heads, and medical ads adds up to a trip first to the mute button and eventually the off switch. Which plugs me right back into the notification stream and a new contract with us based on whether we click on the link or even allow the notification in the first place.

And these new voices are networks of one or a few, broadcasting on a global reach pastiche of cloud services that begin with the ubiquity of Zoom and its click and you’re there ease of on boarding. Then there are the key networks of record as it were: Facebook Live, Twitter/Periscope, YouTube, and maybe LinkedIn if you’re Brent Leary and got an early invite. There’s a whole bunch of streaming accelerators like Restream and StreamYard and Just Streams (I made that up) to use software and a dash of hardware to do what it took many thousands of dollars and cables just a few years ago. Right now it’s early days, but soon you’ll be seeing something that looks like the media it’s replacing as the OG buys in.

Don’t believe me? Just look at how streaming has disrupted the television industry. Or the music business. Or the reemergence of podcasting and newsletters. Or how messaging is growing rapidly as a preferred digital commerce and marketing channel. The pandemic has certainly had a devastating effect with the loss of theaters, events, and travel that drive so much of our economy and the emotional underpinning of our lives. But as we learn to respect the power of the virus to force this digital wave of transformation, we fuel the winners that emerge from a new hybrid blend of evolution and adaptation.

Technology has often been seen as impersonal and cold to the touch. But now we should be making friends with robots for touchless shopping, At the beginning of this Gillmor Gang session, Frank Radice seemed stunned by the administration’s takeover of the symbols of our Washington monuments for political purposes. By the end, he seemed more hopeful of a different result. We have more ways now of making our voices heard, broadcasting our own names in fireworks above and beyond the fake news and suppression. Our platform: suppress the virus, not the vote.

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, August 28, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook
…and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook

News app Flipboard is further expanding into video with Flipboard TV. The company’s curated video service first launched earlier this year as a Samsung exclusive, and is now making its way to all Flipboard users in the U.S. With today’s launch, the service will offer users access to video from hundreds of publishers, including global publishers, local news publishers and, now, select independent video producers, too.

Samsung Galaxy device owners will continue to have exclusive access to upgrade to the premium, ad-free version of Flipboard TV. For everyone else, the service will be ad-supported.

As of today’s expansion, Flipboard has also lined up a number of media partnerships who will provide their video feeds to Flipboard’s app. This list includes Complex Networks, Minute Media, A360 Media, Group Nine Media, The Recount, Bonnier Corp, Refinery29, Dow Jones, Hearst Magazines, Gannett, Vice Media Group, and Penske Media Corporation, with brands such as Rolling Stone and Variety. Video from Euronews, Tribune Publishing, and dozens of others will also be available through a new partnership with VideoElephant, the company says.

Image Credits: Flipboard

In addition, Flipboard is bringing independent publishers on board for the first time, like filmmaker Gene Nagata (aka Potato Jet) and video journalist Johnny Harris. These have been onboarded through Flipboard’s partnership with the influencer agency, Spacestation Integrations. Other independents include Gary Vaynerchuk, AudPop’s filmmakers, and Underknown, producer of video series such as “What If” and “How To Survive.”

Despite its expansion beyond traditional news publications, Flipboard says it’s making careful choices when it comes to its video lineup, in terms of quality.

“It’s not a free-for-all,” says Flipboard VP of Global Growth and Biz Dev, Claus Enevoldsen. “We have been very conscious about the whole ecosystem and making sure that what shows up for you in ‘For You’ is stuff that we know is not fake news. It’s trusted sources. That’s always been our MO, and we extend that to the video space, as well,” he explains.

Image Credits: Flipboard

The new video feeds will be available within a dedicated Video Tab in Flipboard’s Content Guide. The company says users will be able to more easily find videos to watch within the app due to improved discovery features and deeper integrations. In addition to its Content Guide, 20 top-level topics will now offer video-only feeds alongside articles, including travel, politics, local, lifestyle, sports, news, and more. The videos will also be more prominent in users’ “For You” feeds, which is a mix of editorial and algorithmic curation.

Users will be able to add video-only feeds to their own magazines, too, if they prefer.

These videos, for the first time, will play natively within Flipboard. This helps to power Flipboard’s recommendation engine that directs you to related videos, the company says. This change also means users will be able to use additional video controls, like those that let them skip to the next video, for example.

Image Credits: Flipboard

The new video effort additionally ties into Flipboard’s recent expansions into local news that began at the start of 2020. As of this June, Flipboard’s local news coverage reached 50 cities across the U.S. and Canada.  Today, that number is 61. Now, Flipboard users will be able to follow their favorite local news outlets’ video content, as well, directly in Flipboard.

This presents what’s often a much cleaner experience that visiting the news publishers’ own app or website. Flipboard, meanwhile, offers an undisclosed revenue-share with its news partners, derived from the advertising that runs in their videos.

These ads play both as pre-rolls and mid-rolls, Flipboard says. This is the first time it’s run pre-roll ads on its platform — something that the company believes will help to address demand from publishers for high-quality, brand-safe digital video experiences on mobile.

At launch, Flipboard is selling the ad inventory for the videos. But the company says its intent is to allow publishers to sell the inventory themselves, further down the road. (If the publisher already has an ad sales team that can sell into this, however, they can continue.)

To promote their video content, publishers can also opt to use Flipboard’s recently launched Storyboards feature which, instead of being algorithmic feeds are static collections of content they want to highlight.

“Today’s launch builds on the publisher ecosystem we’ve been fostering for almost a decade, our foundational vision for content discovery, as well as our recent work around Flipboard TV,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s co-founder and CEO, about the launch. “The new native video player opens up new opportunities for new user experiences, partnerships and monetization. I expect us to partner with more creators and independent producers in the near future.”

The new features are rolling out today within the Flipboard app in the U.S.

The U.S. market has no real frontrunner poised to claim TikTok’s throne if the app is banned in the country. According to Trump’s executive order, TikTok’s owner ByteDance has to divest of TikTok’s U.S. operations or the app will be banned from the U.S. market on November 12. A number of companies have considered the TikTok deal, including front-runner Microsoft, Twitter, Google, and even Oracle, for some reason. But if a deal doesn’t get done, it’s unclear what app — if any — will be able to take TikTok’s place.

Instagram, of course, is clearly vying for TikTok users with the launch of its latest short-form video feature called “Reels.” But the addition has so far seen mixed reviews. Though it’s still early days for Reels, The New York Times rushed to call it a “dud” on arrival. Engadget, meanwhile, said the feature was actually a “worthy rival,” but it gets lost in Instagram’s bloat. Instagram also is not a direct TikTok clone. It’s become an all-purpose social network for photo-sharing, viewing Stories, online shopping, live video content, long-form video (IGTV), private messaging, and more.

It’s unclear if TikTok users will truly consider Instagram an alternative in the event that TikTok disappears.

There are a number of other apps that are more direct competitors to TikTok, as they also employ a similar vertical video feed format, focus on short-form video, and offer a combination of editing tools and music that made TikTok so popular. The lineup today includes Likee, Byte, Triller, Dubsmash, and Zynn, among other smaller players. But among these apps, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, there’s no clear leader.

According to data provided by app store intelligence firm App Annie, Singapore-based Likee had the largest number of weekly active users in the U.S. for the week ending August 8. (For context, Trump’s executive order was signed on August 6.)

Likee is very much a TikTok clone, unfortunately with ripped content aplenty, no less. App Annie reports it had 1.9 million weekly active users across iPhone and Android combined in the U.S. during the week of August 2-8, 2020. Likee has also steadily grown its weekly active users numbers and hit a high of No. 71 in overall downloads on iPhone back on May 27.

(Photo by Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The next two largest apps were Byte and Triller with 1.1 million weekly active users apiece, during the same time period of Aug. 2-8. Both also briefly flirted with the top of the App Store charts as news of a potential ban made the headlines. This allowed Byte to reach No. 1 in overall downloads on iPhone on July 8. Triller then followed, briefly reaching No. 1 in overall downloads on iPhone on August 1.

Dubsmash trailed, App Annie said, with 800,000 weekly active users during Aug. 2-8. It got as high as No. 10 in overall downloads on iPhone on July 9.

Meanwhile, despite reports of being filled with stolen content, TikTok clone Zynn had a decent showing. The app had 600,000 weekly active users during the week ending Aug. 8. It hit No. 1 in overall downloads on iPhone on May 27, after seeing a bust of downloads and active users in late May.

However, Zynn doesn’t present a solution to the TikTok problem as it, too, is operated by a Chinese tech giant. The app was created by Owlii, owned by a billion-dollar Chinese company Kuaishou, which is the second-most popular video platform in China after Douyin (ByteDance’s name for China’s version of TikTok).

There are a number of lesser-known TikTok alternatives as well, including Lomotif, Funimate, Kwai, Firework, and others. And there are video apps that focus on some aspect of TikTok, such as the live-streaming apps like Live.Me, Twitch, and Caffeine, as well as social video chat apps like Squad, Houseparty, Murge, and others. But none of these could be considered a TikTok competitor.

Snapchat is another big name vying for TikTok’s users, but it doesn’t yet have TikTok-like features launched publicly.

TechCrunch reported in July the app was testing TikTok-style navigation. Earlier this month, Snap announced it would soon test a feature that lets users set their Snaps to music, similar to TikTok, and had music licensing deals lineup up to that effect. Given the overlap with TikTok’s Gen Z user base, Snapchat could do well here but it seems in no rush to get this feature out, unlike Instagram. The company said it would begin the test the feature later this fall.

What could happen, instead, if TikTok were to entirely disappear, would be a fracturing of its user base across a range of competitive apps.

Already, there are signs of this happening. On news of the possible TikTok ban, a community of TikTok users who call themselves “alt TikTok” — a group that includes those known for their absurdist humor as well as gay TikTok, BuzzFeed reported — stormed Byte. The brief app store chart ranking bumps seen by other apps like Triller and Dubsmash also indicate the TikTok community was hedging its bets by setting up shop on competitive apps just in case.

Of course, losing TikTok for good is a worst-case scenario. The hope for many fans of the short-form app is that the company sells the U.S. operations in order remain in this market.

By now you’ve probably heard that under pressure from the current administration, TikTok owner ByteDance is putting the viral video service up for sale, and surprisingly a couple of big name enterprise companies are interested. These organizations are better known for the kind of tech that would bore the average TikTok user to tears. Yet, stories have persisted that Microsoft and even Oracle are sniffing around the video social network.

As TechCrunch’s Danny Crichton pointed out last week, bankers involved in the sale have a lot of motivation to leak rumors to the press to drive up the price of TikTok. That means none of this might be true, yet the rumors aren’t going away. It begs the question why would a company like Oracle or Microsoft be interested in a property like TikTok?

For starters, Oracle is a lot more than the database company it was known for in the past. These days, it has its fingers in many, many pies including marketing automation and cloud infrastructure services. In April, as the pandemic was just beginning to heat up, Zoom surprised just about everyone when it announced a partnership with Oracle’s cloud arm.

Oracle isn’t really even on the board when it comes to cloud infrastructure market share, where it is well behind rivals AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and IBM, wallowing somewhere in single digit market share. Oracle wants to be a bigger player.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has successfully transitioned to the cloud as well as any company, but still remains far behind AWS in the cloud infrastructure market. It wants to close the gap with AWS and owning TikTok could get it closer to that goal faster.

Simply put, says Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, if Oracle combined Zoom and TikTok, it could have itself a couple of nice anchor clients. Yes, like the proverbial mall trying to attract Target and Nordstrom, apparently Oracle wants to do the same with its cloud service, and if it has to buy the tenant, so be it.

“TikTok will add plenty of load to their infrastructure service. That’s what matters to them with viral loads preferred. If Microsoft gets TikTok it could boost their usage by between 2% and 5%, while for Oracle it could be as much 10%,” he said. He says the difference is that Oracle has a much smaller user base now, so it would relatively boost its usage all the more.

As Mueller points out with the government helping push TikTok’s owner to make the sale, it’s a huge opportunity for a company like Oracle or Microsoft, and why the rumors have weight. “It’s very plausible from a cloud business perspective, and plausible from a business opportunity perspective created by the US government,” he said.

While it could make sense to attract a large user base to your systems to drive up usage and market share in that way, Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says that just by having a large U.S. tech company buy the video app, it could make it less attractive to the very users Microsoft or Oracle is hoping to capture.

“An old guard enterprise tech company buying Tiktok would likely lessen the appeal of current users. Younger people are already leaving Facebook because the old folks have taken it over,” Leary said. And that could mean young users, who are boosting the platform’s stats today could jump ship to whatever is the next big social phenomenon.

It’s worth pointing out that just today, the president indicated support for Oracle, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The publication also reported that Oracle’s billionaire owner Larry Ellison is a big supporter of the president, having thrown him a fundraiser for his reelection bid at his house earlier this year. Oracle CEO Safra Catz also has ties to the administration, having served on the transition team in 2016.

It’s unclear whether these companies have a genuine interest, but the general feeling is someone is going to buy the service, and whoever does could get a big boost in users simply by using some percentage of their cash hordes to get there. By the way, another company with reported interest is Twitter. Certainly putting the two social platforms together could create a mega platform to compete more directly with Facebook.

You might see other big names trying to boost cloud infrastructure usage like IBM or Google enter the fray.  Perhaps even Amazon could make an offer to cement its lead, although if the deal has to go through the federal government, that makes it less likely given the tense relationship between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the president that surfaced during the Pentagon JEDI cloud contract drama.

Apple has already indicated that in spite of having the largest cash on hand of any company with over $193 billion, give or take, it apparently isn’t interested.  Apple may not be, but somebody surely is, even some companies you couldn’t imagine owning a property like this.

Don’t know what you’re in the mood to watch? Netflix’s new “Shuffle” feature could help. The company confirms it’s currently testing a feature that puts a big button labeled “Shuffle Play” right on the Netflix home screen, beneath your user profile icon. When pressed, Netflix will randomly play content it thinks you’ll like. This could be a movie or show you’re currently watching, something you’ve saved to your list, or a title that’s similar to something you’ve already watched, the company says.

The new button is currently showing up on the Netflix app for TV devices, much to many users’ surprise. Some users thought the addition could be fun or useful, while others just seem confused.

The company tells TechCrunch the idea behind the feature is to help its members quickly and easily find content that’s tailored to their tastes. This is a challenge Netflix has addressed over the years through a variety of features and tests, like screensavers on its TV apps, pre-roll videos, and even promotional content showcased on the home screen. Ultimately, the company wants the experience of using Netflix to feel more like watching traditional TV — meaning you can just turn it on and something starts playing. (Of course, that’s also what gave us the annoying auto-playing feature, which Netflix finally allowed users to disable with an update earlier this year.)

The new “Shuffle Play” button is the latest in a long series of tests where Netflix has tried to make a shuffle concept work. Last year, for example, Netflix tried out a shuffle mode that let you click on a popular show to start playing a random episode. This may have worked well when users wanted to play a random episode of their default pick, like the “The Office” or “Friends,” but Netflix is losing the former in 2021 and it has already lost the latter.

More recently, some Netflix users discovered a shuffle option called “Play Something” in their TV app’s sidebar navigation. (See below)

Netflix confirmed these are all variations on the general “shuffle mode” concept, which it’s been trying out across surfaces, including what it calls the “profile gate,” as well as the side menu and the main screen. Currently, the “Shuffle Play” button on the profile screen is the only test that’s still underway, we’re told.

The company said it started to roll out the new test to members worldwide last month and only on TV devices. Netflix has yet to make a decision about if or when it will launch a shuffle feature publicly, as it needs to first collect feedback from each different test and compare the results.

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Tuesday, August 11, 2020. For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

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