Tik Tok
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‘At 50, you’re just getting started’
One morning in 2015, as 59-year-old Sally Misha Hamana waited for a department store clerk to serve her, a man — “a gentleman,” she says — lined up next to her. “I like your hair,” he told her. His throwaway comment left her speechless. She’d stopped coloring her grays a few months back, and her cropped pixie cut was 100% silver. “What does it matter what I look like?” she’d thought. “Nobody sees me anyways.”
The struggle began in her forties, when she was marketing a Texas rodeo. People began talking over her. Dismissing her ideas. Long-term colleagues sidelined her…
One owner reported their bored dog simply lays on top of all their buttons and ‘just starts mashing them’
Over the past year, Stella, a Catahoula and blue heeler mix, and Bunny, a sheepadoodle, have amassed viral fame for using an array of recordable buttons to “talk” to their owners. Each button corresponds to a word, and dogs like Bunny are trained to press them to communicate with their people. Putting together sentences like “more scritches now,” and “all done outside. come eat,” the dogs have racked up millions of followers and even prompted serious scientific study into whether such tools could be used by animals to communicate complex thoughts.
Big Technology
Plus, more insight on the social app’s future after a remarkable 2020
OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts with notable figures in and around the tech industry.
This week, Gary Vaynerchuk, owner of digital ad agency VaynerMedia, and Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s head of global business solutions, join the podcast in an episode recorded at Web Summit. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.
TikTok is in a state of limbo as the U.S. government decides…
Big Technology
A series of under-appreciated risks make acquiring TikTok anything but a sure thing
As TikTok owner ByteDance prepares to sell the app’s U.S. operation, some are already calling the deal a bargain, or the next Instagram. But this acquisition is filled with risks that the popular discussion has largely ignored.
A social app is a delicate piece of merchandise, one that will break in the hands of people who don’t know what to do with it. The leading bidders — Oracle, and a combination of Microsoft and Walmart — are understandably jumping at the chance to buy the hottest app on the planet. …
Pattern Matching
Trump’s ban on Chinese apps is part of a tide of digital nationalism
Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.
“The dream behind the Web,” wrote the person who invented it, “is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.”
That was Tim Berners-Lee, writing in 1997, eight years after he proposed the idea that would become the World Wide Web. He went on: “There was a second part of the dream…
Pattern Matching
There’s no such thing as an apolitical social platform
Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.
When the Chinese tech startup ByteDance bought the lip-syncing app Musical.ly for about $1 billion in 2017, the move registered little more than a blip on the U.S. tech news scene. The app was wildly popular, but almost exclusively with teens, and the acquisition didn’t seem particularly noteworthy in a geopolitical sense.
By 2019, the app — having rebranded in fall 2018 as TikTok — was starting to gain mainstream attention as a refreshingly fun and seemingly apolitical counterpoint to scandal-plagued Facebook…
Recent tensions along the border and cybersecurity concerns led to this unprecedented move
Earlier this week, India’s Ministry of Information Technology issued a press release banning 59 apps that the government says pose a “threat to sovereignty and integrity” of the nation. Although the press release does not call out any country by name, the fact that all the apps are Chinese leaves no doubt as to the target.
- TikTok
- SHAREit
- Kwai
- UC Browser
- Baidu Map
- Shein
- Clash of Kings
- DU Battery Saver
- Helo
- Likee
- YouCam Makeup
- Mi Community
- CM Browser
- Virus Cleaner
- APUS Browser
- ROMWE
- Club Factory
- NewsDog
- BeautyPlus
- UC News
- QQ Mail
- Xender
- QQ Music
- QQ Newsfeed
- Bigo Live
- …
We talked to him, and the clip might be a bit less spontaneous than advertised
In a TikTok video that went massively viral last week, 28-year-old freelance photographer Jeremy Cohen invites viewers to follow along as he lands a date with a “quarantined cutie” via some ingenious flirting tactics while practicing social isolation.
In the video, which Cohen narrates over the popular TikTok track “death bed (coffee for your head)” by Powfu, he explains how he spotted Tori Cignarella dancing on a roof in his neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. He says he “needed to say hi to her,” got her attention by waving, and decided to make a move, attaching his phone number to a…
TikTok and Snap are experimenting with deepfake-style filters
Deepfakes were going to be artificial intelligence’s first great scourge. According to journalists and experts in the last two years, the technology that automatically stitched and animated one person’s likeness onto another person’s body would be used by malicious actors to create torrents of fictitious speeches from world leaders and public figures.
But it seems like that was mostly wrong. Certainly, individuals have been hurt by deepfakes: In 2019, a report emerged that more than half of deepfake videos online were related to porn, targeting the women that the algorithms were originally designed to emulate and harass. …
Youth, Now
Engineers and product designers amplify content that meets their business goals. Their choices have unintended consequences.
At first glance, the app TikTok looks like something I’ve seen before. With its short, vertical videos that play on an endless loop, TikTok is reminiscent of Vine, the defunct short-form video-sharing platform. Options to view my profile or search the app are pinned to a bar on the bottom. Share, comment, and “heart” options are stacked on the right. To create a video, I’m prompted to click the large plus sign centered on the bottom.
Before filming anything, I swipe through TikTok’s “for you” feed. It’s a vertical string of featured video clips that I can only assume were…
