China’s TikTok today launched an education program in India as the popular short-video app looks to expand its offering and assuage local authority in one of its biggest markets. This is the first time TikTok is serving educational content in any market, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
TkTok, owned by the world’s most valued startup Bytedance, said it’s working with a number of content creators and firms in India to populate the platform with educational videos.
These bite-sized clips cover a range of topics from school-level science and math concepts to learning new languages. The social app is also featuring videos that offer tips on health and mental awareness, and motivational talks.
The social platform, which is used by more than 200 million users in India every month, said its education program is aimed at “democratizing learning for the Indian digital community on the platform.” (TikTok had 120 million monthly active users in April this year.)
It has partnered with edtech startups Vedantu, Toppr, Made Easy, Gradeup that will produce educational content for TikTok. It is also collaborating with social enterprises Josh Talks and the Nudge Foundation to mentor 5,000 people across India. (Some of the partnerships were disclosed a few months ago.) An executive with Josh Talks said the firm has been able to reach more than 35 million users in less than two months on TikTok, far more users than it has attracted on other platforms.
Sachin Sharma, Director of Sales and Partnerships at TikTok, said the social app’s foray into education is a response to the demand it has seen from users. Educational videos are some of the most popular and engaging videos on the platform, he said at a press conference in New Delhi.
In recent months, more than 10 million educational videos have been created and shared on TikTok, where they have garnered over 48 billion views, Sharma claimed. He did not reveal the financial structure of TikTok’s deal with its creator partners.
As consumption of mobile video booms in India, thanks in part to the availability of cheap data and proliferation of low-cost Android handsets, a growing number of edtech startups have emerged in the nation to deliver their catalog online.
Eight-year-old startup Byju’s, which offers a learning app, has seen its customer base balloon in recent years. The startup, valued at over $5.75 billion, had about 35 million users as of three months ago.
Educational content is also more attractive to advertisers, which could help TikTok explore better monetization options in the future, analysts said.
Expansion to e-learning would also help the startup improve its brand image with local authority. The app has already run into issues in India a couple of times. Earlier this year, an Indian court banned TikTok, alleging that it was hosting and promoting pornographic and other illicit content. The ban was later lifted.
Source: TechCrunch
Winnow, the U.K. startup that has developed smart kitchen tech to help commercial kitchens reduce food waste, is disclosing $12 million in Series B funding.
Backing the round is Ingka Group (a strategic partner to the IKEA franchisee system), Mustard Seed, Circularity Capital, D: Ax and The Ingenious Group. It follows a recent $8 million loan from The European Investment Bank (EIB), meaning that Winnow has added $20 million of capital in the last month.
Counting global clients such as IKEA and the Armani Hotel in Dubai, Winnow is on a mission to offer the hospitality industry technology to help cut down on food waste by making commercial kitchens ‘smarter.’ Its latest Winnow Vision product automates waste tracking by using computer vision to track what food is being discarded and therefore enabling kitchens to make better inventory decisions.
Notably, the Winnow system claims to have already reached and surpassed human levels of accuracy in identifying food being thrown away. “This means for clients, over time, these systems will enable their kitchens to automatically register food waste without any human interaction. Food will be thrown in the bin and the data will be captured automatically,” says the company.
More broadly, the idea, as Winnow founder and CEO Marc Zornes likes to put it, is that what gets measured, gets managed. The startups says that kitchens using Winnow tend to see a 40-70% reduction in food waste within 6-12 months, driving food cost savings between 2-8% in total.
Citing its main costs as “hardware and service delivery for each unit deployed,” Zornes says Winnow will use the new cash injection to further improve its technology and focus on “doubling down” on product development. This will include investing in new QA engineers to enhance development, through to front end developers to improve its reporting features.
Source: TechCrunch
The Swedish automaker introduced the XC40 Recharge, which can go from 0 to 60 mph in 4.9 seconds, and reach about 200 miles on a charge.
Source: Wired
Over the past few years, gig economy companies and the treatment of their labor force has become a hot button issue for public and private sector debate.
At our recent annual Disrupt event in San Francisco, we dug into how founders, companies and the broader community can play a positive role in the gig economy, with help from Derecka Mehrens, an executive director at Working Partnerships USA and co-founder of Silicon Valley Rising — an advocacy campaign focused on fighting for tech worker rights and creating an inclusive tech economy — and Amanda de Cadenet, founder of Girlgaze, a platform that connects advertisers with a network of 200,000 female-identifying and non-binary creatives.
Derecka and Amanda dove deep into where incumbent gig companies have fallen short, what they’re doing to right the ship, whether VC and hyper-growth mentalities fit into a sustainable gig economy, as well as thoughts on Uber’s new ‘Uber Works’ platform and CA AB-5. The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Arman Tabatabai: What was the original promise and value proposition of the gig economy? What went wrong?
Derecka Mehrens: The gig economy exists in a larger context, which is one in which neoliberalism is failing, trickle-down economics is proven wrong, and every day working people aren’t surviving and are looking for something more.
And so you have a situation in which the system we put together to create employment, to create our communities, to build our housing, to give us jobs is dysfunctional. And within that, folks are going to come up with disruptive solutions to pieces of it with a promise in mind to solve a problem. But without a larger solution, that will end up, in our view, exacerbating existing inequalities.
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Source: TechCrunch
The company reveals how much we binge its originals like Money Heist, Tall Girl, Secret Obsession and Unbelievable.
Source: CNET
Amazon seemingly didn’t realize what it had on its hands with the original Echo. Released five and a half years back for a select number of Amazon Prime users, the first Alexa device ushered in a consumer electronics revolution.
According to numbers from Canalys, 26.1 million smart speakers were shipped in Q2 2019. That’s a hefty 55.4% growth from the year prior, with Amazon capturing just over a quarter of the total global market. Much of Amazon’s growth (up 61% y-o-y) is courtesy of its rapidly growing line, which now ranges from the $50 Echo Dot to the $200 Echo Studio.
At $100, the Echo sits right in the middle. And unlike Google, which has left the Home largely unchanged during its two-year existence, Amazon’s now on the third generation for its own base-level device.
The latest version of the device, announced at an Alexa event at Amazon HQ in Seattle earlier this month, ditches the swappable face gimmick of the previous generation. Instead, the company has focused on the speaker part of the smart speaker. It was something that was too often neglected by earlier devices, which were primarily viewed as a conduit for voice assistants.
Of course, if someone is simply looking for a cheap and easy way to introduce a smart assistant into their home, they can pick up an Echo Dot or Nest Mini for a fraction of the price — or, for that matter, the $25 Echo Flex wall plug.
The new Echo slots pretty nicely between the Dot and Studio, Amazon’s new HomePod competitor. It’s probably not where you want to do all of your music listening, but it’s a nice addition to a desk at home or work, or a room like the kitchen where music listening is secondary. More importantly, software updates like stereo pairing with two Echo devices and multi-room music, paired with hardware add-ons like Echo Sub, Link and Input, have made the $99 product a potential addition to a larger, better sound system.
The third-generation Echo certainly marks an improvement sound-wise over earlier models. It offers decent 360 sound and surprisingly heavy bass, courtesy of a 3.0-inch woofer and 0.8-inch tweeter. There’s also a 3.5-inch audio jack for inputting or outputting sound. The setup is essentially the same as last year’s Echo Plus, only without the increasingly less important smart home hub functionality.
In fact, the device looks almost identical to the second-gen Echo Plus, leaving many wondering if the product is long for this world. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the company phase out the product entirely after selling through this batch during the holiday season.
With four different colors, the Echo should fit in well with most surroundings. The rounded, fabric-covered model is a far cry from the early days of hard plastic. There is a prominent light ring up top to let you know when the Echo is listening, along with a quartet of buttons: volume up/down, microphone and the action button, which performs a variety of tasks, including firing up Alexa and turning off timers.
Maybe it’s the fact that I just reviewed the Nest Mini, but touch functionality would be a nice addition here. When you move your hand toward the speaker while it’s playing music, a pair of lights illuminate for volume. Tapping the middle of the device would play or pause music. It’s a simple but handy addition.
All in all, solid additions on the hardware front, coupled with the continued addition of things like selectable music services make for a solid upgrade to the company’s base smart speaker.
Source: TechCrunch
The scrappy but lovable Pied Piper gang will be back for a final season later this month Here’s what to expect.
Source: CNET
Apple released a supplemental update for MacOS 10.15 Catalina on Tuesday. Saving Game Center data is now more reliable when playing Apple Arcade games offline.
Source: Digital trends
OpenAI demonstrated a robotic arm successfully completing the puzzle. It didn’t show the machine dropping the cube—or the 10,000 years of simulated training.
Source: Wired
The space tourism company partnered with Under Armour to create the suits private astronauts will wear on Virgin Galactic flights.
Source: CNET