You’ve probably come across YI’s range of affordable security cameras while browsing on Amazon or other shopping sites in the past. Recently, the company’s Kami brand launched its $90 battery-powered outdoor camera. After spending some time with it, it’s clear that while it doesn’t quite provide the same experience you’d get from a wired $400 Nest Cam IQ or similar product, it’s a solid security camera and the ease of use makes up for its shortcomings.

With the Kami Wire-Free Outdoor Camera (that’s its full name), you get a bullet-style camera that you can easily put anywhere you want, thanks to its wireless design. The fact that it’s wireless worried me a bit, given that I wasn’t sure how long those four 2600 mAh batteries would last, but even after a few hours of essentially live-streaming a picture of my backyard, the battery is still at 75%. Given that you’re not likely to do that under normal circumstances — and that YI promises up to six months of battery life — this should do just fine.

The camera itself streams and records 1080p video at 20 frames per second with a 140-degree field of view. Its IP-65 rating means you don’t have to worry about it getting wet, though I haven’t tested it in a full downpour yet. There’s also a microphone and speaker, in case you want to have a friendly conversation with your local burglar (or the delivery driver, whomever comes first).

You can run the camera without adding any internal storage and simply send six-second clips directly from the camera to your phone. You also can add a micro-SD card for longer recording times or subscribe to YI’s cloud storage service, which starts at $15 for a three-month plan and seven days of recording history.

While it’s wireless, you still have to attach the camera somewhere. YI provides all the installation hardware to attach the camera virtually anywhere you can drill a screw.

As for the software side, getting started simply involves popping in the batteries, using the camera to scan a QR code from the Kami or YI app (they are essentially the same) to connect to your Wi-Fi network and you’re ready to go. The process shouldn’t take more than a minute.

Especially at this price, these are solid specs, and the image quality, both during day and at night, using the camera’s night vision, is good.

The only area where I felt the camera fell short of my expectations was in its motion detection. It uses passive infrared motion detection, and while that ensures that your camera isn’t going to ping you about every car that drives by, I did get a few random alerts when it started raining, for example, or when a bird flew through my yard. On other days, there were no false positives at all.Unlike some other cameras, including YI’s own lineup of indoor cameras that I’ve used in the past, this one doesn’t allow you to set up a specific zone to monitor. That’s an odd omission, and the one area where the camera fell short of my expectations. Occasionally, it also takes a long time for the camera to start streaming the live video feed and you have to exit the camera view and go back to the main menu. That’s not exactly a deal breaker, but it is a bit of an annoyance. A software update could probably fix both of these issues.

Overall, though, the new Kami outdoor camera provides solid performance at this price. It won’t wow you, but it’ll do what it promises to do, and at this price, that’s all you can ask. Whether you trust the company and are comfortable with the privacy implications of having your house under 24/7 surveillance is something you have to decide for yourself, of course. So far, though, YI has had a pretty good track record and no major breaches.

Following a successful debut for Tinder’s first foray into original content, the company is giving its interactive video series “Swipe Night” another run. The company confirmed today it’s renewing “Swipe Night” for a second season that will launch this summer, again as an in-app experience within Tinder’s dating app.

Variety first reported the news of “Swipe Night’s” return. Tinder further confirmed the details to TechCrunch.

“Swipe Night,” as you may recall, first launched in October 2019 within Tinder. The experience introduced a first-person adventure played in-app, where users would make choices at key turning points to progress the narrative — like a choose-your-own-adventure story.

The series was designed to increase user engagement and help the app’s young users better connect.

Today, half of Tinder is Gen Z (ages 18-25) — a demographic that’s embracing their single lifestyle and more casual relationships compared with those on other dating apps, like Tinder parent company Match, for example, or its newer acquisition Hinge. These younger users connected with the idea of starting conversations based on a shared experience, says Tinder.

However, the reality is that “Swipe Night” had also arrived at a time when users were opening Tinder’s app less on a daily basis, even as monthly usage climbed. Though “Swipe Night” only ran on specific dates in October 2019, users’ choices within the interactive experience were added to their profiles. This allowed users to see who else agreed with their decisions and who took the opposite path. That made launching Tinder and swiping through profiles more compelling — even for those who may have been tiring Tinder before the series’ arrival.

The experiment worked. Tinder said millions of users tuned in to “Swipe Night” and matches and conversations increased by 26% and 12%, respectively. With “Swipe Night,” it seemed, Tinder finally gave users something to talk about.

The returning second season of “Swipe Night” will again be directed by Karena Evans, who directed Coldplay’s music video “Everyday Life” and Drake’s “In My Feelings” and “God’s Plan.” This time, it will be written by Jessica Stickles (“Portlandia,” “Another Period”) and Julie Sharbutt (“3 Days”).

“Working on Swipe Night was such a fulfilling experience for me. I got to do something that had never been done before and innovate with storytelling to bring a generation of people together. I’m in search of projects that impact, shift or curate a culture and couldn’t be more excited to return for more,” said Evans, in a statement.

“Swipe Night’s” second season may see Tinder tweaking the formula a bit, and may even introduce new mechanics to keep it feeling fresh.

In addition to the Season 2 launching in the U.S., Match previously confirmed that 10 international markets across Europe and Asia will get “Swipe Night” this year. Tinder said today that Season 1 would be launching internationally on March 14th, but declined to say when those users would receive Season 2.

Vimeo signaled last year its plans to move further into the social video creation and editing space with its acquisition of short-form video editor Magisto. Today, the company is unveiling the results of its work in the months following the deal’s close with the debut of Vimeo Create. The new app includes a set of video creation tools aimed at small businesses and marketers looking to tell their stories using social video, but who lack the resources, time or budget to invest in video production at the scale they need to compete.

With Vimeo Create, available on both the desktop and as an app, businesses choose from pre-made, professionally-designed video templates that can be customized to meet their needs. More advanced users could opt to start a new video from scratch, as an alternative.

The app includes a library of stock content to add to videos, including millions of HD video clips, photos, and commercially-licensed music tracks available for no extra fee, Vimeo says. Businesses can also customize their videos by selecting the colors, fonts, layouts, logos, text captions and calls-to-action they want to use.

The app then leverages A.I.-powered technology to turn the clips, photos, music, and text into a high-quality social video in minutes.

Vimeo Create also simplifies the process of designing videos for different social platforms, where aspect ratios (e.g., square, vertical, horizontal) and format requirements vary. After the video is finalized, users are able to publish across the web — including to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn — as a part of the Vimeo Create workflow.

The move into social video creation is part of Vimeo’s larger strategy of becoming a one-stop-shop for companies and individuals who publish videos online. The company has long since abandoned its plans to be a YouTube competitor, instead seeing the potential in the other side of the video market. Today, Vimeo makes money by offering tools and services to video creators both large and small. It has launched tools for uploading and livestreaming across social sites and updated its mobile app to include more features previously available only to desktop users, among other things.

Vimeo decision to prioritize social video resulted from its own research. The company found that only 22% of small business owners felt they were using enough video. The businesses complained that issues around time, cost and complexity were keeping them from going further. Nearly all (96%) of small business owners said they would create more video if all those friction points were removed.

The service was built using parts of Magisto’s backend and its A.I., but the overall app, feature set, content, user interface and integration into Vimeo’s tools were built from the ground-up, the company says.

The company hopes Vimeo Create will help it to grow its subscription revenue, as the service is offered as a part of Vimeo’s Pro, Business and Premium membership plans, instead of as a standalone paid or freemium app.

“Video is the most impactful medium we have today for human expression at scale, and businesses
need an online video strategy to reach their customers. But the research is clear: small business owners
and entrepreneurs don’t have the tools, time or budgets to make videos at the volume and quality
needed to compete,” said Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud, in a statement about the launch. “Vimeo Create levels the playing field. It’s a radically simple tool that shortens the distance from idea to execution, so more businesses can have a successful video strategy.”

Vimeo isn’t alone in addressing the social video needs of small businesses. Last fall, Facetune maker Lightricks launched a full suite of apps for small businesses to use for their social media marketing campaigns. There are also dozens of tools for video editing on the market, including those from incumbents, like Adobe and Apple, as well as from others like Magisto, Canva, PicsArt and many more that offer features craved by small business owners like templates, easy editing tools, access to stock content, and support one-click multiplatform publishing, among other things.

Vimeo first launched Vimeo Create into beta back in January, but today it’s available to all across web, iOS, and Android.

Facebook’s Creator Studio has added a mobile companion. The insights dashboard for creators and publishers, which debuted globally in August 2018, is now available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Similar to the desktop hub, the Creator Studio app allows users to track how their content is performing across Facebook Pages, as well as publish, schedule and make adjustments to posts, respond to fan messages, and more.

Facebook Director of Entertainment for Northern Europe Anna Higgs took the stage along with creator Ladbaby, who has over 4 million Facebook followers, to share the news of the new app’s launch at last week’s VidCon London.

There are a few key areas where the app can be of use to creators and publishers, starting with its metrics and insights section. Here, users can analyze both Page and post-level insights, retention, and distribution metrics in order to adjust their strategies accordingly. For example, they’ll find content performance metrics like “1-minute views,” 3-second views,” and “avg. minutes viewed,” plus engagement metrics like comments and shares, and follower counts, earnings, and more.

The app also serves as a mobile companion for viewing both published and scheduled posts, allowing creators to make quick adjustments like editing the video titles or descriptions. And they can use the app for deleting or expiring posts, rescheduling posts, or publishing drafts.

From the inbox section, users can respond to incoming messages and comments while on the go.

Creators can toggle between their different accounts during the same session, instead of having to log out and back in as a different user. This could be helpful for those who have a large social media presence, as well as those whose business involves supporting multiple creator pages.

The Creator Studio app will also send out immediate notifications for key milestones and other important events.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has offered a dedicated app for its creator community. The company in 2017 debuted a Creator app, that had also offered a unified inbox and analytics, among other things. But that app was shut down early last year, and creators were pointed towards the Pages Manager app or desktop version of Creator Studio instead. Before that, Facebook had offered a Mentions app that was only available for verified public figures and Pages.

The new Creator Studio app isn’t a direct replacement for the shuttered Creator app, as it sports a similar, though not identical feature set and a new user interface. It also notably lacks Instagram integration and the ability to upload and post new content — the latter which is contributing to poor user reviews, following the app’s launch. Many complain there’s too much overlap with the Pages Monitor app, as well. But the missing features are something Facebook will likely address in the future, as it rolls out more functionality to the app.

It’s worth noting that Facebook’s desktop hub and app sport a name similar to YouTube’s service for creators — YouTube Studio, rebranded from YouTube Creator Studio in 2017. By including both “studio” and “creator” in the new app’s name, it will perform better in App Store search results — including those that appear when someone searches for the YouTube Studio app for creators. That reflects the competitive nature between the two companies, both hungry to woo video creator talent.

Facebook’s new app is a free download on iOS and Android.

TikTok announced today the introduction of a new set of parental controls, called “Family Safety Mode,” designed to let parents set limits on their teenage children’s use of the TikTok mobile app. The suite of features includes screen time management controls, limits on direct messages, and a restricted mode that limits the appearance of inappropriate content.

According to TikTok, parents who want to enable Family Safety Mode must first create their own account on the app, which is then linked to the teen’s account. Once enabled, parents will be able to control how long the teen can spend on the app every day; turn off or limit who the teen can direct message; and choose to turn on TikTok’s “restricted” mode that will limit inappropriate content.

These features were already available in the app for users to set for themselves, to be clear. The new Family Safety Mode just puts a parent or guardian in charge of toggling the switches on or off for their teens, and prevents the settings from being changed without parents’ involvement.

It’s not clear how well TikTok’s restricted mode works, as TikTok doesn’t explain the screening process it uses. For an app of this scale, it’s likely based in large part on users flagging inappropriate videos, however. Parents should be aware, then, that restricted mode is not going to be a foolproof means of controlling the user experience.

The new set of parental controls is actually only a subset of the controls users can enable for themselves. For example, users can also choose to make their accounts private, turn off commenting, or control who’s allowed to duet with them, among other things.

But the controls do tackle some of parents’ largest concerns around the addictive nature of TikTok’s app, the content being delivered, and the private messages that parents can’t monitor.

The launch timing follows increased scrutiny by government regulators of TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.

In 2019, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined the app Musical.ly (which had acquired by ByteDance. ), $5.7 million for violation of U.S. children’s privacy law COPPA. And in the U.K., TikTok has been under investigation by the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for potential GDPR violations around the protection of children’s data.

Not coincidentally, TikTok says the new parental controls are first available in the U.K., starting today. They’ll roll out to other markets in the weeks ahead, TikTok says but didn’t indicate which ones.

The parental controls, however, have been designed with European law in mind. In the U.S., TikTok offers the age-gate for younger users, but not controls for parents like this.

In addition to the launch of Family Safety mode, TikTok parented with creators to produce a series of safety videos about screen time management to encourage users to take a break from their phone. These are being added to the TikTop Tips video series and will also roll out in the app starting first in the U.K. today.

Can’t afford Netflix and HBO and Spotify and Disney+…? Now there’s an app specially built for giving pals your passwords while claiming to keep your credentials safe. It’s called Jam, and the questionably legal service launched in private beta this morning. Founder John Backus tells TechCrunch in his first interview about Jam that it will let users save login details with local encryption, add friends you can then authorize to access your password for a chosen service, and broadcast to friends which of your subscriptions have room for people to piggyback on.

Jam is just starting to add users off its rapidly growing waitlist that you can join here, but when users get access, it’s designed to stay free to use. In the future, Jam could build a business by helping friends split the costs of subscriptions. There’s clearly demand. Over 80% of 13-24 year olds have given out or used someone else’s online TV password, according a study by Hub of over 2000 US consumers.

“The need for Jam was obvious. I don’t want to find out my ex-girlfriend’s roommate has been using my account again. Everyone shares passwords, but for consumers there isn’t a secure way to do that. Why?” Backus asks. “In the enterprise world, team password managers reflect the reality that multiple people need to access the same account, regularly. Consumers don’t have the same kind of system, and that’s bad for security and coordination.”

Thankfully, Backus isn’t some amateur when it comes to security. The Stanford computer science dropout and Thiel Fellow founded identity verification startup Cognito and decentralized credit scoring app Bloom. “Working in crypto at Bloom and with sensitive data at Cognito, I have a lot of experience building secure products with cryptography at the core.

He also tells me since everything saved in Jam is locally encrypted, even he can’t see it and nothing would be exposed if the company was hacked. It uses similar protocols to 1Password, “Plaintext login information is never sent to our server, nor is your master password” and “we use pretty straightforward public key cryptography.” Remember, your friend could always try to hijack and lock you out, though. And while those protocols may be hardened, TechCrunch can’t verify they’re perfectly implemented and fully secure within Jam.

Whether facilitating password sharing is legal, and whether Netflix and its peers will send an army of lawyers to destroy Jam, remain open questions. We’ve reached out to several streaming companies for comment. When asked on Twitter about Jam helping users run afoul of their terms of service, Backus claims that “plenty of websites give you permission to share your account with others (with vary degrees of constraints) but users often don’t know these rules.” 

However, sharing is typically supposed to be amongst a customer’s own devices or within their household, or they’re supposed to pay for a family plan. We asked Netflix, Hulu, CBS, Disney, and Spotify for comment, and did not receive any on the record comments. However, Spotify’s terms of service specifically prohibit providing your password to any other person or using any other person’s username and password”. Netflix’s terms insist that “the Account Owner should maintain control over the Netflix ready devices that are used to access the service and not reveal the password or details of the Payment Method associated to the account to anyone.”

Some might see Jam as ripping off the original content creators, though Backus claims that “Jam isn’t trying to take money out of anyone’s pocket. Spotify offers [family plan sharing for people under the same roof]. Many other companies offer similar bundled plans. I think people just underutilize things like this and it’s totally fair game.”

Netflix’s Chief Product Officer said in October that the company is monitoring password sharing and it’s looking at “consumer-friendly ways to push on the edges of that.” Meanwhile, The Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment that includes Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Comcast, and major film studios announced that its members will collaborate to address “piracy” including “what facilitates unauthorized access, including improper password sharing and inadequate encryption.”

That could lead to expensive legal trouble for Jam. “My past startups have done well, so I’ve had the pleasure of self-funding Jam so far” Backus says. But if lawsuits emerge or the app gets popular, he might need to find outside investors. “I only launched about 5 hours ago, but I’ll just say that I’m already in the process of upgrading my database tier due to signup growth.”

Eventually, the goal is not to monetize not through a monthly subscription like Backus expects competitors including password-sharing browser extensions might charge. Instead “Jam will make money by helping users save money. We want to make it easy fo users to track what they’re sharing and with whom so that they can settle up the difference at the end of each month” Backus explains. It could charge “either a small fee in exchange for automatically settling debts between users and/or charging a percentage of the money we save users by recommending more efficient sharing setups.” Later, he sees a chance to provide recommendations for optimizing account management across networks of people while building native mobile apps.

“I think Jam is timed perfectly to line up with multiple different booming trends in how people are using the internet”, particularly younger people says Backus. Hub says 42% of all US consumers have used someone else’s online TV service password, while amongst 13 to 24 year olds, 69% have watched Netflix on someone else’s password. “When popularity and exclusivity are combined with often ambiguous, even sometimes nonexistent, rules about legitimate use, it’s almost an invitation to subscribers to share the enjoyment with friends and family” says Peter Fondulas, the principal at Hub and co-author of the study. “Wall Street has already made its displeasure clear, but in spite of that, password sharing is still very much alive and well.”

From that perspective, you could liken Jam to sex education. Password sharing abstinence has clearly failed. At least people should learn how to do it safely.

YouTube in September announced a $100 million fund to invest in new children’s video content, following its $170 million settlement with the FTC over children’s privacy law violations. The fund was meant to help soften the blow for children’s content creators on YouTube, who are being financially impacted by the changes the FTC required of their channels. Now we have the first bit of insight into what sort of content YouTube plans to back with the fund’s resources.

According to a report by Bloomberg, YouTube is looking to fund videos that “drive outcomes associated with the following character strengths:” courage, compassion, communication, gratitude, curiosity, humility, teamwork, integrity, perseverance, self-control, empathy, and creativity.

The details were shared in a note to partners, the report said.

“All our programming will seek to support kids in uncovering their unique strengths and passions,” the note read. “Specifically, we want to develop content that inspires children to develop life skills and pursue their passions; establish healthy habits and care for themselves; increase their understanding of culture and diversity; and/or engage with and care for their community.”

YouTube confirmed the report’s accuracy to TechCrunch. It said the company is now in discussions with partners, but further details on the kids content fund wouldn’t be shared until later this year.

The planned $100 million investment, which will be distributed over the next three years, is meant to help set the tone for the sort of children’s video content YouTube wants to see more of on its video-sharing platform.  Today, a number of creators in the kids’ space are gaining views for things like toy unboxings, pranks and family vlogs. For example, Ryan Kaji of Ryan’s World and Ryan ToysReview, was YouTube’s highest-paid star of 2019, pulling in a massive $26 million.

Parents, on the other hand, don’t often care for their kids’ addiction to this sort of lightweight, consumer-driven content. And thanks to updated screen time controls across iPhone and Android, they can now choose to limit the time their kids spend on YouTube. And with a growing number of streaming services on the market, including the kid-friendly Disney+, kids and families have other options.

The move to fund an elevated set of kids’ content could also help YouTube attract more advertising dollars, as companies are looking to pair their marketing messages with “brand-safe” content, which can be hit-or-miss on YouTube at times.

YouTube has no immediate concerns on the ad revenue front, having pulled in $15 billion in 2019. But the company knows there’s still so much more room to grow, given the TV ad market still massively dwarfs YouTube, with $70 billion in ad spending last year.

Earlier this week, Google released revenue figures for YouTube for the first time in the product’s history, revealing that the video service pulled in $15.1 billion in advertising revenues in 2019. Growth was 31% year-over-year during the quarter — strong growth for such a late-stage property, but of course, everyone always wants more. The company also claimed that it had an audience of more than 2 billion users — making it among the most popular products in the world.

Part of that global success comes from countries like South Korea, where YouTube has long been a serious laggard to local video players, but which has managed to penetrate the market much more heavily in recent years.

According to the latest data from Wiseapp, an app usage and retail revenue data service for the Korean market which is sort of a fusion of App Annie and Second Measure, YouTube has seen dizzying growth over the past few years, particularly among older, non-millennial users.

Based on data from Android users, YouTube has seen consistent increases in unique users in the market, almost to a point of saturation. At the end of 2019, Wiseapp estimated that YouTube had nearly 34 million Android users, up 6% from 2018 and 38% from 2016.

Data from Wiseapp, exclusively depicting Android users

For context, South Korea has a population of about 51.5 million, and local polling from Gallup puts Android penetration at roughly 80% overall. One serious caveat here is that there is a huge age discrepancy between Android and iPhone users — iPhone penetration among twenty-somethings is nearly half, while its penetration among users over 50 is in the low single digits.

While YouTube has had users aplenty for years, what’s been striking has been seeing the increase in the average view time on the platform. Again, for Android users measured by Wiseapp, YouTube increased its total minutes viewed on its platform by 38% last year, and has seen 187% growth since 2016. The platform isn’t just getting more users, but deepening engagement with those users over time.

A Google PR representative would not confirm third-party data about the platform’s performance, but did say in a statement to TechCrunch that the hours of content uploaded to Korean YouTube channels grew by 50% between 2018 and 2019. The company also said that as of February 2019 (the most recent data available), “there are over 12,000 channels with over 10K subs, over 2000 channels with 100K subs and more than 200 channels with 1M+ subs in Korea.”

What’s changed in the local market? A handful of trends are lining up in YouTube’s favor, helping it break through local competitors for the lucrative online video market.

First and perhaps most importantly according to local sources, more and more creators have moved their businesses to YouTube from other competitors due to better creator economics on the platform.

As Cynthia Kim at Reuters discussed in a profile article last year about the changing job market in South Korea, “YouTube creator” is a new career path for some young people interested in focusing on their interests and expressing their thoughts online for income. From the article:

“Among elementary school students, YouTube creator is now the fifth-ranked dream job, behind being a sports star, school teacher, doctor or a chef, a 2018 government poll showed.”

As those creators have migrated to YouTube, so have users, or so the thinking goes. And so you see the number of popular channels increase, and the total number of video hours uploaded growing quickly to capture that increased usage.

Another dynamic at play is globalization. While many Koreans grew up watching Friends or Home Alone in their drive to learn English and compete effectively on the country’s harrowing college entrance exam, YouTube offers a much wider vista into all kinds of places beyond those depicted by Hollywood.

As one former senior Korean technology executive, who once managed a competing product to YouTube, explained to me, the challenge for local players is that they just don’t have the kind of global content library that is attractive for users. Local players have local content, and while engagement remains high, they lack the extended global content that platforms like YouTube can provide.

What’s interesting is that Korean globalization has also worked the other direction. Korean dramas and Korean pop bands like BTS have expanded dramatically in global popularity over the past decade. Google said in its statement that the top 25 Korean bands on YouTube now receive 90% of their views from outside the country.

In short, YouTube has broken into an app ecosystem that is almost entirely local, and has even done so in a tough demographic like older users which have been particularly impervious to non-Korean apps. Messaging app KakaoTalk remains the country’s most popular app, and the only other top-ranked foreign app is Instagram at number eight with an estimated 10 million Android users from Wiseapp’s calculation.

While some analysts were surprised at YouTube’s smaller than expected revenue numbers, it is clear that the platform is making headway in a variety of other international markets. As other emerging digital economies like India, Africa and Southeast Asia come online, expect even more competition in this category between this big global video product and local competitors.

VSCO, the photo-sharing app that became a Gen Z meme, is expanding further into video. The company already supported video editing via its app, but users couldn’t publish and share the results of their long-form video content directly to the VSCO feed. That now changes, starting first with VSCO members on iOS.

Video publishing has been a longtime request among the app’s users, the company says, and arrives at a time when video editing has been booming on VSCO’s platform.

Over the past year, VSCO has seen video editing double. In addition, usage of its GIF creation tool, DSCO, has remained one of its most popular features, the company claims. In December, VSCO signaled its intention to move further into the video market with the acquisition of video technology company Rylo.

While Rylo was well-known for making compact cameras, it had been more recently been focused on a set of mobile video editing tools. VSCO said it planned to roll out these tools to the community in 2020. While VSCO hasn’t said what tools will be included, the Rylo mobile app already offered features like video stabilization technology and the ability to create a perfectly framed clip from any section of a 360-degree shot, among other things. The overall idea was that you could shoot first and in a more carefree fashion, then compose your scene after the fact.

Today, VSCO’s video editing tools are more focused on photo-like edits, including the use of presets and adjustments to things like exposure or contrast. With the launch of video publication, VSCO promises more advanced video capabilities are soon on the way, thanks to Rylo.

First launched in 2011, VSCO has been more recently thrust into the mainstream thanks to the VSCO girl meme — a parody of a certain type of Gen Z girl sporting a messy bun, Hydro Flask, metal straw, puka shell necklace — and Instagram photos first tweaked by carefully applied VSCO filters.

However, VSCO the company didn’t need a meme to boost its business. The app now sees over 20 million active users per week, with over 2 million paying customers.

In addition, VSCO said in December it was on pace to surpass 4 million paying users sometime in 2020 and was approaching $80 million in annual revenue, thanks to the app’s $19.99 annual subscription.

To grow its brand, VSCO partnered with Snap on its first Snapchat lens in November, which worked on photos and video. Presumably, the company now wants to capture the interest of the TikTok generation by becoming the first stop for edits ahead of publication to short-form video destinations.

To use the new video publishing features, VSCO members on iOS can tap the plus icon in the top right of the app, then switch over to the video tab. Users can then edit the video and post, as before with photos. VSCO says Android support will arrive in the weeks ahead along with support for favoriting and republishing videos.

New short-form video app Byte, heralded as Vine’s successor, is off to a strong start despite its issues. The app, built by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, brings back the six-second videos made popular by Vine which was shut down in late 2016 after Twitter’s acquisition of the popular video-sharing platform. According to new data from Sensor Tower, Byte’s launch has been well-received with over 1.3 million downloads during its first week alone. The U.S. delivered the bulk of these new installs, followed by Great Britain then Canada.

The U.S. contributed 912,000 downloads, or 70% of the installs, the report says. While Great Britain and Canada offered 7% and 6% of installs, respectively. The majority of Byte downloads were also on iOS, with 950,000 iOS downloads compared with 350,000 installs on Android.

App Annie’s numbers differed a bit, but also found that Byte topped 1 million total downloads on iOS and Android through Sunday, Feb. 2.

Sensor Tower’s new report compares Byte’s figures to Vine’s debut in January 2013, which only saw a total of 775,000 installs during its first week on iOS. However, that doesn’t mean Byte is soon to be a much more popular app than its predecessor.

For starters, the app market has grown over the years to include more users and more devices. In 2016, for example, only 2.5 billion users worldwide had smartphones. Now that number tops 3.5 billion. In addition, Vine launched as an unknown startup into a market that had yet to really embrace short-form. Byte, on the other hand, not only takes advantage of its association with Vine, it also arrives at a time when short-form video is now hugely popular thanks to Vine’s success and TikTok, the latter which became the No. 4 most-downloaded app of 2019.

Despite its solid launch numbers, Byte’s debut was not unmarred.

The app immediately saw massive comment spam as bots rushed to fill comment sections with follow requests (and follow for follows), including requests from pornbots. Byte’s early adopters also started snatching up coveted usernames — those belonging to real people, ranging from tech folks to celebs like Taylor Swift and other prominent figures like Trump, Bezos, Tiger Woods and others, Slate reported. The company quickly moved to acknowledge the problem and promised a cleanup was underway.

But that’s not Byte’s only issue. The app originally launched with a 12+ age rating, yet was immediately filled with adult humor alongside videos from obvious minors. Surfaced in Byte’s popular feed were videos with dick jokes and sexual humor, and problematic content including distasteful jokes about child abuse and coronavirus victims.

To give you a sense of Byte’s content, a perusal of the “Popular” feed on Friday surfaced a video featuring a teenaged-to-young adult boy joking “if you call me a slut in the comments one more time, I’m going to suck all your d***s.” Another teenaged-appearing boy joked about a prostate exam performed by his dad. A boy of a similar age asks if anyone had ever pooped into someone’s….and then the video cuts off.

It’s unclear if the boys in question are 18 or older, but seeing these — as well as so many other videos featuring dick jokes — followed by videos filmed by very young children was an uncomfortable experience.

The Popular feed also featured a video of a drone trying to fly a dildo into a sex doll. One video made light of child abuse, with a man viciously hitting the phone screen. The video is filmed from above, giving you the child’s perspective. The caption read: “when a child brings up a valid argument.”

Two other videos featured toddlers – one of a dad knocking the baby down, perhaps on purpose, as they played ball, only to later fall himself. Another depicted someone spraying a baby in the face with the kitchen sink nozzle, followed by the baby crying.

One video made fun of Chinese people dying from coronavirus. Another showed a teen smoking a joint, then hearing a siren and running.

Vine videos were strange and dumb in their own way, but the best weren’t typically crass or dirty. Think:  duck army, eyebrows on fleek, hate blockers, what are those, Squidward hits the dab, and so on.

Given the amount of adult humor, Byte’s lack of an age-gate and the app’s 12+ rating was concerning. (Byte updated to 17+ over the weekend. The above videos aren’t surfacing now. We know Apple was taking a look at its content).

Another potential concern was that a lot of Byte’s content was recycled from elsewhere — there were clips from YouTube, FunnyorDie, TV shows, and even TikTok — logo and all. Users also reposted Snapchat videos and memes from around the web.

With the changes to the age rating, it seems Byte may have been alerted to some of its more problematic content. Byte now puts a curated Spotlight feed at the top of its discovery page, where videos curation is improved.

The company on Friday also published the initial details on its Partner Program, touting the potential for revenue other platforms don’t provide.

TikTok, by comparison, hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize — its app has seen 1.65 billion downloads to date, but only grossed $176.9 million in 2019. However, TikTok’s elite are making names for themselves that allow them to grow their brand in other ways, including by directing users to other social channels like YouTube and Instagram, and even doing meet-and-greets with fans.

Whether a whole new world of Byte stars emerges remains to be seen.

When siblings Labinot and Mimoza Bytyqi fled the war in Kosovo in 1999, arriving as refugees on the West Coast of the US, they would have had no idea they’d go on to launch a technology company together.

But as adults, the pair set up attacking the $6.7 billion telepresence and video communication category which hasn’t evolved much since the older business systems form Cisco and Polycom . By integrating their Solaborate device with Smart TVs, the entrepreneurs have come up with a drastically cheaper device and platform.

Solaborate has now closed a $10 million Series A funding round from EPOS and Demant Group. EPOS is a newly established company under the healthcare tech company Demant Group in Denmark which makes high-end audio solutions designed for enterprise and gaming. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of Solaborate’s new product line of all-in-one HELLO devices and its cloud communication platform.

After two successful Kickstarter campaigns, Solaborate will now work with EPOS to combine compute, microphones, speakers and Smart TVs with their technology to create products fully-owned by and branded under EPOS. These will include Solaborate’s patented auto echo-cancellation delay.

Labinot Bytyqi, founder and CE) said: “We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right and that’s why we engineered HELLO devices with video and audio built-in hack-proof privacy controls and end-to-end encryption for everyone’s protection and peace of mind.”

A HELLO device require only two cables – HDMI and power – and then turns any TV into a voice-controlled open cross-platform communication and collaboration device supporting video conferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts Meet, Zoom, Skype, Cisco WebEx, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, BlueJeans, Fuze, Unify, and several more.

The partnership will focus on video collaboration to deliver integrated audio/video solutions to the platforms of EPOS’ current strategic partners such as Microsoft.

They are pushing at an open door. The video conferencing market is predicted to grow from an estimated $1.8bn to more than $2.8bn by 2022, according to some studies.

The latest project to emerge from Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, takes the newfound interest in short-form video and focuses it on the DIY space. The company today is launching a short video platform called Tangi, initially on the web and iOS, that allows creative types to share how-to videos on subjects like crafting, painting, cooking, fashion, beauty and more.

Unlike apps like TikTok or newly-launched Byte, which are more focused on entertainment, Tangi aims to help people learn.

“We only focus on DIY and creativity content,” explains Tangi founder, Coco Mao. “Our platform’s goal is to help people learn to craft, cook, and create with quick one-minute videos. We designed Tangi to make it easier for users to find a lot of high-quality how-to videos,” she says.

Mao was inspired to create Tangi after going home to visit her parents in Shanghai. She found they were watching a lot of how-to videos on painting and photography on their phone, even though she had always believed they were “smartphone challenged.”

“My mom has always had a creative side, and I was surprised to learn that she’s now an amateur oil painter thanks to these niche communities with quick how-to videos,” Mao says. “I, too, joined some of these vibrant creative communities that make videos around cooking and fashion. I noticed something magical in these videos: They could quickly get a point across—something that used to take a long time to learn with just text and images,” she notes.

While Tangi’s vertical videos can be up to one-minute long, most average around 45 seconds. That means it’s not necessarily the place to be walked step-by-step through a complicated recipe as you could be on YouTube, for example. Instead, the videos might show you a quick cooking trick or inspire you to try a new idea in the kitchen.

Another difference between Tangi and other short-form video apps is a feature it includes called “Try It.” This encourages users to upload photos of their re-creation of the video as a way to interact with other community members, says Mao.

For example, one of the most re-created videos is this one of making guacamole in the avocado shell.

The creator might leave an actual recipe in the comments, however, even if they don’t show you each individual step in detail. (And it’s arguably a lot easier to follow a recipe on Tangi than on most of today’s recipe sites which are overrun with ads and SEO-driven “personal stories.”)

Already, Tangi is being used by a number of creators including DIY and lifestyle blogger Holly Grace, portrait artist Rachel Faye Carter, baker and food creator Paola D Yee, beauty vlogger Sew Wigged Out, art and DIYer TheArtGe, cooking and DIYer JonathanBlogs, and others.

Also unlike other social video apps, uploading to Tangi isn’t currently open to all. Instead, creators need to apply to be a part of the video platform. This allows Tangi to ensure their videos remain focused on creativity and DIY activities.

As a viewer, you can search Tangi for whatever it is you want to learn or filter videos by category, like art, cooking, DIY, fashion & beauty, and lifestyle. Or you can simply scroll down the home page until something catches your interest. To save a video or show your support for the creator, you click the heart icon to like the video. This saves it to your “Liked” section under your profile.

Tangi ends up having a sort of Pinterest-y vibe due to its content.

At launch, Tangi is available everywhere except the E.U., initially on the web and on iOS. The app is a free download, is ad-free, and isn’t currently being monetized in other ways.