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Will the TikTok ban affect startups operating in the creator economy industry? Not exactly, say the founders

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President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that might ban TikTok — for real this time. After so many false starts and stops, some creator economy founders and their clients are rolling their eyes. They’ve been through this before.

“I think two years ago it would have been devastating,” Karat Financial co-founder and CEO Eric Wei told TechCrunch. “Now… Eh.”

When creators succeed, startups operating in the creator economy generally succeed as well. Still, Wei is not particularly concerned that the friction of the TikTok ban will impact his company, a Series B startup that gives financial services to creators.

“In startups, if you create products that help creators make money, then in terms of the market you can address, that’s good for you,” Wei said. “You might be thinking, ‘TikTok is gone, as a creator you need to think about diversification and ways to make a living, so here are the things you can do in XYZ.'”

The threat of a TikTok ban is a bit like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, although this time it’s different. This just isn’t just political theater in the type of ongoing Senate hearings. The bill, which might force ByteDance to sell TikTok if it doesn’t discover a U.S. buyer inside nine months, passed the House and Senate to Biden’s desk, where he signed it.

But the creative landscape looks different now than it did in 2020, under President Donald Trump tried to ban an application owned by the Chinese (and while running for president again, he claims that he’s against a ban because it might give Meta an excessive amount of power). Established creators have had about three years of legal wrangling and two different presidencies to organize their corporations for a world without TikTok.

As Wei looks through the large group chat he’s in with other creators, he notices that nobody has panicked.

“I’m scrolling through and there are a few jokes in there – one guy jokes, ‘My Snapchat shares are about to go up,’ and another guy said, ‘Let’s do a skit: when TikTokers protest the TikTok ban – who’s in on it?'” he said. “A third said, ‘TikTok is going to sue, I’ve talked to their employees,’ and a fourth replied, ‘Where’s my popcorn?'”

This doesn’t apply to all creators. Wei notes that broadcasters and TikTok creators who generate income through TikTok Shop may feel the effects the most because platforms like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels don’t invest in these features as much as TikTok. The ban may be harmful to politically-minded creators, as Instagram Reels just isn’t a viable alternative for them – the Meta-owned platform has began limiting the reach of political content. And while the more established creators in Wei’s group chat have been preparing for this for years, the move away from TikTok may very well be an enormous blow to newer creators who don’t yet have followers across multiple platforms.

“To be clear, no one is going to say, ‘It’s good for us’!” Wei said. However, the period of time the creators had to organize for this moment made them higher prepared to weather the storm.

“It’s been talked about for a very long time, so creators are aware of it – it’s not new,” Harry Gestetner, co-founder and CEO of creator monetization platform Fanfix, told TechCrunch. “Secondly, this is not an overnight ban. The creators still have about a year to move their fans, so I’m optimistic.”

James Jones – CEO Hitone other company providing financial services for creators – is the situation in parallel.

“TikTok’s absence will undoubtedly have a ripple effect among the creative community,” Jones told TechCrunch. “But creators are getting better at differentiating how they monetize across multiple platforms. We have already seen this video with Vine, and it paved the way for TikTok to fill the void it left.”

TikTok’s secret is its power to assist creators get discovered – greater than another platform, anyone can get noticed on For You. Although Instagram videos and YouTube Shorts may be in comparison with “Mark Kirkland TikTok” in 2021, these platforms have matured.

In the initial TikTok Creator Fund, a static pool of cash distributed amongst a growing variety of eligible creators, few people lived solely on TikTok views. This only recently modified when TikTok moved creators to its Creativity Program, which offers eligible creators a greater deal – but not all creators create videos that meet the program’s requirements. So for content creation to supply them with a stable profession, they might have to modify to other platforms anyway. YouTube Shorts has began sharing ad revenue on short videos, much like its long-running associates program, while Instagram Reels only offers occasional and unreliable bonus programs.

Gestetner told TechCrunch that a few of the creators he works with were dissatisfied with TikTok anyway.

“The problems with TikTok go beyond the ban itself,” he said. “Creators often have their TikTok accounts deleted, shadowbanned, or reported, making it very difficult to get a response from TikTok. That’s why we’ve been dealing with problems for years.”

It’s not that other platforms don’t share these transparency concerns. However, these threats have made it difficult for developers to place all their energy into one platform.

“Five years ago, creators typically used one platform,” he said. “Now every creator has at least three, and at most five, six or seven platforms that they use.”

The must diversify goes beyond the platforms creators use. Creators also must generate income from quite a lot of sources, whether through fan memberships, product sales, live performances, or courses.

“I think there will be no impact on our business or potentially a positive impact,” Gestetner said. “This helps in our case because all creators are skeptical of large platforms and don’t want all of their monetization to be tied to a specific platform.”

In theory, a ban on TikTok could create space in the market for an additional short-video app — perhaps one that may not owned by an enormous corporation like Meta or Google. But it probably won’t be one other situation like what happened when Elon Musk bought Twitter and several other microblogging apps appeared seemingly overnight.

“I think a really good example is: Remember Triller?” Wei said. “For a moment all of us got enthusiastic about it and thought, ‘Oh my God, TikTok is pulling out, let’s donate to Triller!’ But then everyone realized that TikTok wasn’t going away. And now, years later, is anyone talking about Triller anymore?”

Well, they won’t be talking about Triller either because the company is a walking business red flag. In any case, creators won’t have the patience to take a position in a nascent platform that will not survive, so they’ll should play catch-up on Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. But that doesn’t suggest TikTok won’t be missed.

“I think overall the fans will feel it the most,” Gestetner said. “But I think the Short and Reels experience is getting better and better.”

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode’, bad hiring and why avoiding risk is deadly

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Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold a complete of two corporations for billions of dollars. Now he plans to start out delivering takeaway food Wonder made public in a couple of years, at an ambitious valuation of $40 billion.

We recently spoke in person with Lore in New York about Wonder and its ultimate goal of constructing meal planning easier, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophy. Below is a part of what he said on the topic, flippantly edited for length and clarity.

Lore on the so-called founder modewhere founders and CEOs actively engage not only with their direct reports, but in addition with “skip level” employees to make sure that small challenges don’t grow to be big ones (Brian Chesky works this fashion, as does Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, amongst others):

Yes, I didn’t just like the founding mode because I operate in a different way. I focus very much on the concepts of vision, capital and people. We meet weekly with the leadership team and spend two hours every week on the core elements of vision, strategy, organizational structure, capital plan, our performance management systems, compensation systems, behaviors and values ​​- akin to: things you’re thinking that are already set.

You think, “Oh, yeah, we’ve done certain behaviors before. We have already established the values. We dealt with performance management. We have our strategy.” But as you grow and develop quickly, it’s amazing how much it evolves over time, and you must sustain with it… and just speak about it and speak about it.

When everyone is fully aligned and you have got really good people, you simply allow them to do it; I do not have to get entangled in any respect. So I won’t go into the small print of what people do, so long as they know the nuances of the strategy and vision. When you connect that together with your team and they achieve that with their very own team, everyone is moving in the correct direction.

What Lore thinks about hiring the correct people:

I actually, really care about hiring rock stars. That is, one and all (I hire). I used to think you could possibly interview someone and inside an hour resolve whether or not they were a rock star. I actually thought so, and I believe other people think so too.

It’s not possible. I’ve employed hundreds of individuals. You cannot tell in an hour-long interview whether someone is a rock star, and it’s normal to get honeyed. Someone talks about a great game, sounds good, says the correct things, has the correct experience, and then it doesn’t work out and you wonder why.

I began going back to resumes and attempting to draw correlations, and I discovered that there was a definite pattern that superstar resumes had that distinguished them from non-superstar resumes. This doesn’t suggest that somebody who doesn’t have a superstar resume cannot be a superstar. I miss these people, it’s okay. But after I see someone with a superstar resume, they’re almost all the time a superstar. When I interview them, I already know that I would like to rent them, and it’s more about ensuring that I’m not missing anything from a behavioral, cultural, or values ​​standpoint – we would like it to be compatible.

However, your resume must show a demonstrable level of success in each position you have got worked in. This means multiple promotions. This means staying with the corporate long enough to advance, and leaving and moving from one company to a different is a giant step. Superstars don’t move sideways. They don’t move from a great company to a bad one because bad corporations must pay more to draw people, so sometimes they shake loose individuals who should not that good, who just need to go for the cash.

But you discover someone who’s (at the highest) 5% and you take a look at their CV and it’s like: boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and then a giant jump… promotion, promotion, big jump . When I get a resume that shows a visual level of success, I take it and pay them what they need. It’s very essential for me to get this superstar there. And you are constructing an organization of superstars.

You have to have a correct performance management system in place in order that they know exactly what they should do to get to the following level. Because superstars are very motivated. They need to know what they should do to get to the following level, especially Generation Z. They need to know and get promoted every six months.

Finally, Lore talks about his belief that taking more risks is the solution to secure a startup’s future, even when this approach could seem counterintuitive to many:

People all the time underestimate the risk of the establishment and overestimate the risk of introducing change. I see it over and all over again.

If you have got a life-threatening disease and the doctor says, “You have six months to live,” at that time you may go on a trial drug or anything, even when it’s extremely dangerous (it should look good). Basically, you are trying to take a risk to avoid inevitable death.

If you are super healthy and every thing’s going great and someone says, “Take this experimental drug; it can make you live longer” (many individuals will say), “You know what? It’s too dangerous. I’m really healthy. I don’t desire to die from this drug.”

However, startups are very different from large corporations. When you’re employed at a big company like Walmart (whose US e-commerce business Lore tracked selling is certainly one of his corporations), it’s about incremental improvement. There is no incentive to take risks.

As a startup founder, you’ll likely die. Every day that you just live and do that startup, there is a risk that you’re going to die. The probability is 80% and only a 20% likelihood it should actually work. So you have got to take this into consideration when making decisions. You must search for opportunities to take risks to cut back your risk of death. The establishment is the worst thing you may do. Doing nothing is the most important risk you may take.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Australian government withdraws disinformation law

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The Australian government has withdrawn a bill that might have imposed penalties on online platforms as much as 5 percent their global income in the event that they fail to stop the spread of disinformation.

The bill, backed by the Labor government, would enable the Australian Communications and Media Authority to create enforceable rules on disinformation on digital platforms.

IN statementCommunications Minister Michelle Rowland said the bill would “provide an unprecedented level of transparency, holding big tech accountable for its systems and processes to prevent and prevent the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation online.”

However, she said that “based on public statements and conversations with senators, it is clear that there is no way this proposal could be passed through the Senate.”

When a revised version of the bill was introduced in September, Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), criticized it in a one-word post: “Fascists.”

Shadow communications minister David Coleman was a vocal opponent of the bill, arguing it could encourage platforms to suppress free speech to avoid penalties. Because the bill seems dead now, Coleman sent that it was a “shocking attack on free speech that betrayed our democracy” and called on the Prime Minister to “rule out any future version of this legislation”.

Meanwhile, Rowland in his statement called on Parliament to support “other proposals to strengthen democratic institutions and keep Australians safe online”, including laws to combat deepfakes, enforcement of “truth in political advertising during elections” and regulation of artificial intelligence .

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can be moving forward with a plan to ban children under 16 from using social media.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Department of Justice tells Google to sell Chrome

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Welcome back to the week in review. This week, we take a look at how the Department of Justice ordered Google to sell Chrome to break its monopoly, whether OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times, and the way artificial intelligence corporations are exploiting TikTok for research purposes. Let’s do it.

The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should get rid of its Chrome browser to help break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google is an illegal monopoly for abusing its power within the search industry, and the Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome poses a “significant challenge” to pursuing countermeasures aimed toward establishing a competitive search engine market.

Anthropic raised a further $4 billion from Amazon and agreed to make Amazon Web Services the first training site for its flagship generative artificial intelligence models. Anthropic can be working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’s chip manufacturing division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, custom AWS chips for training artificial intelligence models. Amazon’s recent money injection brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion.

OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in The New York Times and Daily News’ copyright lawsuit, say the publisher’s lawyers. As part of the lawsuit, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so the lawyer could seek for copyrighted content in its AI training kits. However, within the letter, lawyers for the publishers claim that OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one of the virtual machines.



News

Image credits:Presley Ann/Getty Images and CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Kim Kardashian meets Optimus: The fashion mogul had hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal humanoid robot. In videos posted to X, Kardashian encourages Optimus to make a heart out of his hand, dance like he’s at a luau and play rock, paper, scissors. Read more

Oura’s valuation exceeds $5 billion: The smart ring maker has received a $75 million investment from glucose device maker Dexcom. The investment, which constitutes Oura’s Series D financing round, raises the corporate’s valuation to over $5 billion. Read more

Let’s organize a celebration for Partiful: The customizable event planning app challenges legacy solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events, is a favourite amongst Gen Z users, and was just named a top app of 2024 by Google. Read more

Talk to me in your language: Microsoft will soon allow Teams users to clone their voices so that they can talk to others in up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Read more

Hackers attack Andrew Tate: According to The Daily Dot, hackers breached a web-based course founded by an influencer and self-confessed misogynist, exposing data on nearly 800,000 users. Tate is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on sex trafficking and rape charges. Read more

What makes a bank a bank? The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ruled that each one digital services that handle significant volumes of transactions needs to be subject to bank-style supervision, which could impact Apple Pay, Cash App, Google Pay, PayPal and Venmo. Read more

A more conversational Siri: According to sources cited by Bloomberg, Apple is developing a new edition of Siri based on advanced multilingual models in an attempt to meet up with more natural-sounding competitors comparable to Google Gemini Live. Read more

Making Money With TikTok Brains: Several AI-powered research tools are taking advantage of the “PDF to Brainrot” trend, during which the text of an uploaded document is read in a monotone voice against a backdrop of “weirdly satisfying” vertical videos like Subway Surfers gameplay. Read more

Threads attacks Bluesky: As Bluesky’s user base surpasses 20 million, Instagram Threads has begun rolling out a brand new feature called custom feeds to capitalize on user demand for more personalization. Read more

ChatGPT within the classroom: OpenAI has released a free online course to help elementary and middle school teachers find out how to introduce ChatGPT into their classrooms. However, some educators are concerned about this technology and its potential for error. Read more

Do we want one other day by day word game? Normally I’m an evangelist for word games and crosswords, but I feel like we’re quickly approaching market saturation. Netflix has launched a brand new day by day word puzzle game in partnership with TED called TED Tumblewords. Read more

Analysis

selection of x-ray scans of the human head
Image credits:Real444/Getty Images

Please don’t send X-ray images to the chatbot: People often turn to generative AI chatbots to ask questions on their health concerns and higher understand their health. Since October, X users have been encouraged to upload their X-rays, MRIs and PET scans to the AI-powered chatbot, Grok, to help interpret the outcomes. Medical data is a special category subject to federal protections that, usually, only you may circumvent. But simply because you may does not imply you need to. As Zack Whittaker writes, it’s price remembering that what goes on the Internet never leaves it. Read more

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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