Social – Page 12

India’s Wire retracts reports on Meta citing discrepancies • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 23, 2022Posted in Facebook, india, Media & Entertainment, meta, SocialNo Comments

Wire has retracted its reports on Meta after discovering “certain discrepancies” in its news pieces, the Indian outlet said Sunday, marking what should be an end to the high-profile drama with the social juggernaut that captured the interest of newsrooms and tech companies globally for two weeks. The move follows Wire, a small but gutsy Indian news outlet, setting up an internal review process to evaluate its reporting earlier this week after Meta, the subject of the original story, and the independent sources it relied on vehemently denied the newsroom’s reports. “Our investigation, which is ongoing, does not as yet allow us to take a conclusive view about the authenticity and bona fides of the sources with whom a member of our reporting team says he has been in touch over an extended period of time,” Wire said in a statement. Wire reported earlier this month that Meta gave the governing party BJP’s top digital operative an unchecked ability to remove content from Instagram and ran a series of follow-ups, asserting Meta was insincere in its public denials of the reporting. In one of the stories, Wire cited what it claimed was an internal email from Meta comms Andy Stone. In another, it cited testimonies from independent security researchers vouching for the authenticity of Stone’s email to Wire. (Both Meta and security researchers have disputed the reports.) The Indian news organization said Sunday that “certain discrepancies have emerged in the material used.” “These include the inability of our investigators to authenticate both the email purportedly sent from a*****@fb.com as well as the email purportedly received from Ujjwal Kumar (an expert cited in the reporting as having endorsed one of the findings, but who has, in fact, categorically denied sending such an email). As a result, The Wire believes it is appropriate to retract the stories.” (More to follow)

Elon Musk reportedly wants to lay off 75% of Twitter’s staff • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, Layoffs, Social, TwitterNo Comments

Musk has previously gestured at plans for layoffs if he were to buy Twitter, but those cuts could go even deeper than previously imagined. According to a new report from the Washington Post, Musk plans to purge 75% of Twitter’s workforce, or around 5,600 employees. If Musk’s vision for a much leaner platform comes to fruition, Twitter would be forced to operate with a sliver of its current staff. Between broader economic factors and ongoing criticisms that Twitter has failed to deliver on its promise (at least as far as investors are concerned), Twitter was always going to trim its workforce. But cutting the staff down by three quarters isn’t what most people had in mind. The Post noted that Twitter already planned to cut around a quarter of its workforce — but leaving a quarter of the workforce is a different situation altogether. A grain of salt is necessary here. While Musk reportedly described his aggressive plan over the past few months, there’s often a gulf between his words and the reality of the situation. Musk might want to lay off 75% of Twitter’s workforce — what dollar-signs-for-eyes investor or CEO wouldn’t want to make more money with fewer pesky salaries to pay! — but it’s also conceivable that Twitter wouldn’t even be able to operate if cut to the bone. Musk clearly lacks a fundamental understanding of some serious issues the company faces, some of which could only be resolved by more investment in key areas. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO was keen to lean on Twitter’s former head of security turned whistleblower Peiter Zatko when it suited him, but some of the dire security and safety needs that Zatko brought up certainly wouldn’t be resolved by gutting the whole company. Musk also barely has a grasp of the content moderation issues the company grapples with, another area that benefits from having more humans involved — not just a thrifty algorithm at the wheel. Certainly, and sadly, trust and safety would likely face deep cuts if Musk has his way. It’s also totally plausible that the 75% number is just another trick he pulled out of his hat to impress whoever he was talking to, maybe bankers he was courting for the acquisition or the various slavering rich men he texts with. For the sake of Twitter’s already very stressed current workforce, we definitely hope that winds up being the case. The deal, which is now to back on track after months of Musk sowing chaos, is expected to close by October 28.

BeReal raised $60M in its Series B earlier this year, now has 20M DAUs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Apps, bereal, funding, Social, social media, StartupsNo Comments

BeReal, the photo-sharing app, has been a huge hit with Gen Z and beyond. Now with other big social apps rushing to clone some of its no-frills ethos, it’s put together a war chest to work on its next chapter. ZebethMedia has learned that the startup closed a round of $60 million earlier this year. The funding is coming in the form of a Series B and it values Paris, France–based BeReal at a valuation north of €600 million — which at today’s exchange rates is just under $587 million. (Exchange rates are tricky right now; the dollar is strong against other currencies in the face of global economic turmoil. When the Information first reported on some of the details of this round, it noted the premoney valuation of around $600 million. The size of the round had not previously been reported.) A source tells us that the company now has around 20 million DAUs. As a point of reference, the Information noted that the app had 7.9 million users as of July of this year. The numbers appear to indicate that despite efforts from competing social apps to reproduce the core of the BeReal experience — a two-photo set taken from a user’s front and back phone cameras, to be shared with friends at the same time each day — it ain’t nothing like the real thing, so to speak. The numbers are still only a small fraction of the users the world’s biggest social apps are attracting, but the velocity of BeReal’s growth, and its traction with the key demographic of young adults, have been strong fillips for those other apps to pay attention to how they can bring the same kind of experience into their own platforms. Others that have cloned the app include TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. (We’re not including the now-defunct FrontBack in the list.) Founded in 2019 by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, BeReal began to take off in earnest earlier this year, as its Gen Z user base sent the app climbing the App Store charts. In April, app intelligence firm Apptopia reported BeReal had grown its installs by 315% year to date. BeReal itself is simple to use: once a day, it sends users a notification encouraging them to take a dual photo, or a “BeReal” — a combination of a selfie and a front-facing photo, snapped simultaneously. This experience intends to provide its users with a more authentic photo feed compared with the curated aesthetic found on Instagram. And the photos themselves disappear after 24 hours. The app’s appeal attracted a range of investors, culminating in a $30 million Series A, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel in June 2021. When the Information reported on the Series B earlier this year, it was said to be valuing the app at $100 per daily active user. As one of our sources described it to us, yes, the world of consumer apps has had a lot of examples of early juggernauts fizzling out (sad waves to YikYak, Peach, Yo and the rest). But in relative terms, BeReal’s fast growth and how it seemed to capture attention among a certain group of users made it enough of an interesting bet at this stage. It also came at a time when the app was reaching mainstream awareness — as apparent by the fact that it was the subject of an SNL skit in October. The big question now is how BeReal plans to use the funding and what its next moves might be to evolve its product. The app today has no business model, though the FT said it may be considering subscriptions. Data provided by Sensor Tower this month also found that, despite some 53 million lifetime installs, only 9% of BeReal users on Android were opening the app daily. This doesn’t correlate to real-world usage, though, because more of BeReal’s core user base — younger Gen Z users in the U.S. — tend to use iPhones.

How Talkbase plans to power user-led growth for any company • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Community-led growth, Disrupt, Social, Startups, Talkbase, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

A new startup is setting out to help companies build and harness communities around their products, enabling them to side-step multiple disparate tools and manage everything in a single platform. Founded out of the Czech Republic in 2021, Talkbase launched out of stealth just a couple of weeks back, backed by $2 million in pre-seed funding from a mixture of Czech and U.S. funds, including J&T Ventures, Credo Ventures, Mxv Capital, and Plug & Play Tech Center. The Prague-based company represents one of the Battlefield 200 startup exhibitors at TC Disrupt this week, and ZebethMedia caught up with the cofounders to get the lowdown on what Talkbase is all about, and the problem that it’s looking to solve. Community meets product Much has been written about the various strategies companies pursue for growth, from traditional approaches such as marketing-led and sales-led, through to what is arguably one of the biggest buzzwords of today — product-led growth (PLG), where the product itself does the selling and onboarding. However, community-led growth is also an increasingly popular approach to driving new and repeat business organically — this is where a product’s users serve as advocates and a support network for other would-be customers. Community-led growth is actually closely aligned with product-led growth, insofar as a user has to first be made aware that a product exists, and then convinced that it’s worth checking out and remaining an active user. The “community” that performs this task can be anything from social media influencers and review sites, to dedicated forums such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, Slack, or Facebook Groups. If companies can harness these types of channels through active engagement, and get millions of people banging the drum about their product, they can sit back (more or less) and focus on building rather than selling. As ZebethMedia wrote last year, in many ways, the chief community officer is the new chief marketing officer. “I think in some ways, they [community-led growth and product-led growth] go hand-in-hand, because in order to be product-led, and in order to build an amazing product, you really need to work close with your users,” cofounder and CEO Klara Losert said. “And if you want to work with them well, you build a community around your product.” Talkbase cofounders Klara Losert and Roman Nguyen Image Credits: ZebethMedia There are many examples of startups that have risen to billion-dollar behemoths off the back of community-led growth, from commercial open source companies like MongoDB (which actually isn’t open source any more) to popular creator-focused companies such as Figma (currently in the process of being acquired by Adobe for a cool $20 billion) and $40 billion unicorn Canva, which happens to be one of Talkbase’s early customers. “Community-led growth is one of the most popular growth channels in tech, but there is no platform to support it,” Losert said. “Community managers are responsible for growth, hiring, or retention programs — yet they spend most of their time in Google Sheets, Airtable, forms, and other platforms to launch one single program.” A “program” could mean a one-off event, a series of content (e.g. video demos), or an ambassador program that coaches brand advocates on how best to spread the word. Community managers might use any number of platforms to manage their community, such as Slack, Discord, or Hubspot, and this essentially is where Talkbase enters the fray — it bridges various community management tools, bringing everything under one roof. For example, Talkbase packs task-management and collaboration tools similar to Trello or Asana, allowing managers to assign tasks, and teams to work together on programs to meet deadlines. Talkbase: Task management Image Credits: Talkbase Elsewhere, Talkbase includes features for creating, managing, and scheduling events, such as supporting attendee registrations and managing moderators or speakers. On top of that, Talkbase has purpose-built advocacy management tools for customizing and tracking their goals, and collating feedback for potential new projects. This can also be used to identify existing members of the community (e.g. on Twitter or LinkedIn) who are already vocal supporters of a particular product, making it easier for companies to reach out and engage with directly. Talkbase: Ambassador program It’s worth noting that there are a number of other platforms out there that have raised significant VC money to power community-led growth at companies of all sizes. Commsor recently raised a $50 million Series B, while Common Room secured $52 million. Threado, meanwhile, raised a slightly more modest $3.1 million seed round. It’s difficult to ignore the parallels between Talkbase and these other companies, in terms of how they pull together the different strands that constitute a “community.” But Talkbase says that it’s moving beyond the incumbents by pulling together all the various elements that constitute a community manager’s toolset. While it’s focused mostly on managing events and company ambassadors for now, it’s adding more features to the mix, enabled in part by its recent seed round of funding. Talkbase is tooling up to replace survey tools such as Typeform; CRMs or spreadsheet tools such as Google Sheets or Airtable; event publishing tools such as Eventbrite; and even outbound communication tools such as Mailchimp — Losert said that they are currently in the process of developing their own newsletter tool. In terms of pricing, the company officially unveiled its various plans this week, starting from “free” for a basic tier with restrictions, through $68 per month for the basic plan and a soon-to-launch Pro plan that opens everything up for $680 per month.

Snap stock down 25% as the social network struggles • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Apps, earnings, Snap, Snapchat, SocialNo Comments

Snap reported its third quarter earnings Thursday, the first social media company to offer a financial update amidst ongoing economic tumult this quarter. The company, which has seen its stock price plunge to a fraction of what it was worth during 2021’s highs, missed analyst expectations on revenue, bringing in $1.13 billion compared to the $1.14 billion anticipated. Snap’s stock dipped from around $11 per share to $8 in late trading following the report. Snap’s revenue is up 6 percent this quarter, a number that doesn’t compare favorably to previous periods of double digit growth. The company’s net loss accelerated to $360 million, which includes $155 million in “restructuring charges.” The company’s daily active users were up 57 million to 363 million in Q3, a 19 percent increase from the same period last year. “This quarter we took action to further focus our business on our three strategic priorities: growing our community and deepening their engagement with our products, reaccelerating and diversifying our revenue growth, and investing in augmented reality,” CEO Evan Spiegel said of the quarter. While other social networks are similarly struggling due to a combination of broader economic factors, ascendant competitors and the still-reverberating changes from Apple’s ad tracking changes, Snap in particular has taken a beating. In August, the Verge reported that Snap planned to lay off a fifth of its workforce, or around 1,200 employees. The company didn’t offer a forecast for the third quarter results and similarly declined to make predictions about its upcoming quarter.

Kakao co-CEO resigns after fire incident that caused mass outage • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Apps, Kakao, kakaotalk, Social, south koreaNo Comments

Whon Namkoong, the co-chief executive of Kakao, has resigned from his position after a fire incident at a data center last week caused a mass outage at the South Korea’s top instant messaging app KakaoTalk. Namkoong, who joined Kakao in 2015, was elevated to the co-CEO role this March. At a press conference Tuesday, he said the company will do its best to restore the faith of users. KakaoTalk is the most popular app in South Korea, reaching over 47 million of the nation’s 51.7 million population each month. The app is also used by government officials. Shares of Kakao tumbled on Monday but recovered slightly on Namkoong’s departure announcement. Namkoong apologized for the mass outage “for such an extended period” and said at the conference that he feels “the heavy burden of responsibility” over the incident. (More to follow)

Redditors have created millions of crypto wallets to buy NFT avatars • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Apps, Reddit, Social, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

In July, Reddit jumped on the NFT train, launching an NFT-based marketplace that allows users to purchase blockchain-based profile pictures for a fixed rate. Given the general sentiment around NFTs today, you might assume — like me — that the experiment ended poorly. But the opposite’s the case apparently. Today during a panel at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Reddit chief product officer Pali Bhat revealed that over three million Redditors have used Reddit’s Vault blockchain wallet to create over three million crypto wallets to date. Most of those — 2.5 million — were created to purchase NFT avatars that can be used as profile pics on the platform, he said. It’s difficult to put the figures into context, given that not all NFT marketplaces willingly share those sorts of metrics. But Dune Analytics estimated in a recent report that one of the leading platforms, OpenSea, was hosting over one million active wallets as of January. Meanwhile, crypto wallet MetaMask was serving over 30 million users as of March. Reddit partnered with roughly 30 artists to release around 40,000 NFT avatar designs a few months ago, which could be purchased via the Reddit mobile app at prices ranging from $9.99 to $99.99. (They’re all sold out at the moment.) Users who purchased one of the limited-edition pics got licensing rights to use it on and off of Reddit as an avatar, and could mix and match their avatar’s look using a built-in avatar builder tool. Reddit partnered with Polygon, an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, to mint the avatars. (In blockchain jargon, “minting” refers to publishing a unique NFT so that it can be bought or sold.) Vault is used to store and manage NFTs through the Reddit app. Reddit’s latest foray into the NFT space comes after the social network began allowing users to set any NFT as their profile picture, following on the heels of Twitter. At the time, NFT avatars were exclusively available to members of the r/CollectibleAvatars subreddit, which was invite-only. Beyond NFTs, Reddit has branched in a number of different directions in recent months in search of new lines of revenue. The company has toyed with the idea of introducing TikTok-like video editing tools and made several targeted acquisitions, buying content moderation startup Oterlu, natural language processing company MeaningCloud, machine learning platform Spell and contextualization company Spiketrap. Reddit also revamped its developer portal to give third-party apps and bots a boost, and it upgraded its live audio product, Reddit Talk, with new discovery features.

Omneky uses AI to generate social media ads • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Media & Entertainment, Omneky, Social, StartupsNo Comments

Meet Omneky, a startup that leverages OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 models to generate visuals and text that can be used in ads for social platforms. The company wants to make online ads both cheaper and more effective thanks to recent innovations in artificial intelligence and computer vision. Omneky is participating in Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022. While many fields have been automated in one way or another, creating ads is still mostly a manual process. It takes a lot of back and forth between a creative team and the person in charge of running online ad campaigns. Even when you manage to reach a final design, the new ads might not perform as well as expected. You often have to go back to the drawing board to iterate and create more ads. Omneky aims to simplify all those steps. It starts with a nice software-as-a-service platform that centralizes all things related to your online advertising strategy. After connecting Omneky with your accounts on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Snapchat, the platform pulls performance data from your past advertising campaigns. From this analytics dashboard, you can see how much you’re spending, how many clicks you’re getting, the average cost per click and more. But it gets more interesting once you start diving a bit deeper. Omneky lists your top-performing and worst-performing images and text used in your ads. Customers can click on individual ads to see more details. Omneky automatically adds tags to each ad using computer vision and text analysis. The result is a dashboard with useful insights, such as the dominant color you should use, the optimal number of people in the ad and some keywords that work well in the tagline. This data will be used to generate new ads. Customers write a prompt and generate new visuals using DALLE-2. Omneky also helps you with those prompts as it also uses GPT-3 to generate prompts based on top-performing keywords from past campaigns. Customers then get dozens of different AI-generated images that can be used in online ads. Similarly, Omneky can generate ad copy for the text portion of your ads. If you have a strong brand identity, Omneky can take this into account. On the platform, customers can upload digital assets and historical ads so that the platform acts as the central repository. “Customers can upload the brand guidelines, the font, the logo. All of this is integrated into our AI to generate content that is on brand,” Omneky founder and CEO Hikari Senju told me in a call before ZebethMedia Disrupt. Of course, some images and text don’t work well for one reason or another. That’s why Omneky doesn’t run any ad campaign without the customer’s approval. Team members can add comments, provide feedback and request approval from the platform directly. As soon as customers approve a new ad, it is automatically uploaded and displayed on social platforms — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Snapchat. After that, you are back to square one. You can track the performance of your new ads from the analytics dashboard, iterate and improve your ad performance. The company charges a subscription fee that varies depending on the number of integrations with social platforms that you want to use. Omneky’s long-term vision expands beyond advertising. There’s a lot of data involved with online ads, that’s why it’s easy to automate some of the steps needed to run an online ad campaign. But the startup thinks it could apply the same methodology to other products, such as AI-generated landing pages. If you extrapolate even more, it’s clear that AI-generated content will cause a revolution in the martech and adtech industries — and Omneky plans to participate in that revolution. Image Credits: Omneky

Indian news outlet Wire to review reporting on Meta • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Facebook, india, meta, SocialNo Comments

Indian news outlet The Wire said on Tuesday it is setting up an internal review to assess the documents, information, source material and people it relied on for critical stories on Meta that claimed the social juggernaut gave governing party BJP’s top digital operative an unchecked ability to remove content from Instagram and a series of follow-up pieces in which it said Meta executives were misleading people. The statement on Tuesday follows one of the security researchers that the Wire portended to rely on – and supposedly cited an email by him to confirm the authenticity of a Meta executive’s email – saying a fake email was used to suggest he had participated. Devesh Kumar, one of the tech reporters of the Wire stories, deactivated his Twitter account earlier Tuesday amid mounting criticism. BIG: It has come to my attention that I’ve been listed as one of the “independent security researchers” who supposedly “verified” the Wire’s report on FB ‘Xcheck’ in India. I would like to confirm that I did NOT DO the DKIM verification for them. pic.twitter.com/5zbsJJNCFk — Ka7an (@Kani5hk) October 18, 2022 (More to follow)

Kanye West is buying ‘uncancelable’ social media platform Parler • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Facebook, Instagram, kanye west, parler, Social, TwitterNo Comments

Kanye West, the rapper who also goes by the name Ye, has reached an agreement to buy “uncancelable free speech platform” Parler, the two said in a statement Monday, in a move they said will help individuals express their conservative opinions freely. As part of the deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed, Parler has agreed to sell fully to West, but the social network will continue to receive technical support from Parlement Technologies, including access to its private cloud services and its data center infrastructure. The deal is expected to close in the ongoing quarter. West, who has accused Meta and Twitter of censoring him in recent weeks, said in a statement: “In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.” West, who also runs apparel and sports businesses, was locked out of his Instagram and Twitter accounts earlier this month for posting antisemitic messages. Parler, which is considered a haven for conservatives and has attracted fans of former President Donald Trump, made a return to the Google Play Store last month after it was pulled by Google following the Capital riots in January 2021 for its role in inciting violence. “The proposed acquisition will assure Parler a future role in creating an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome,” the company said in a statement. Parler, based in Nashville, was founded in 2018 by John Matze and Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of the billionaire hedge fund manager and Breitbart founder Robert Mercer. The company, which has sought to rail against censorship and presented itself as “free speech,” added a content moderation layer to the platform last year in bid to be restored by Apple’s App Store. Parler has amassed a little over 250,000 monthly active users on its iOS and Android apps, according to market intelligence platform Sensor Tower. (The data was shared to ZebethMedia by an industry executive.) In a survey of more than 10,000 people, Pew Research reported earlier this month that 38% had heard of Parler. Parlement Technologies chief executive George Farmer said in a statement: “This deal will change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech. Ye is making a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again. Once again, Ye proves that he is one step ahead of the legacy media narrative. Parlement will be honored to help him achieve his goals.”