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Can Byte recreate the magic of Vine?

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Launch Byte, and you’ll find all the usual trappings of video capture apps. There’s your feed with constantly looping six-second videos, an Explore page where you can look at other accounts, an Activity page with the usual “like” and “follow” notifications, a personal profile page and, of course, the center camera button, which is what you’d use to capture your six-second works of art.

Byte

Much like Vine of yore, the interface is fairly simple — there are no selfie filters or crazy effects here. You can, of course, remix existing videos from your camera roll, and there is a Ghost Mode, which helps with positioning in time-lapse or stop-motion videos. But otherwise, the creativity is up to you.

This is in stark contrast to the other big name in the short-video world: TikTok. Instead of six seconds, TikTok videos are up to 15 seconds long (or you can pull four together for 60 seconds). You can add songs to create your own little mini music video, or “Duets,” where you add to another person’s video. These sorts of features make TikTok the perfect medium for viral memes, where anyone can have their 15 minutes of fame simply by dancing to a hooky song. It’s such an influence in popular culture that Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” skyrocketed from TikTok meme to Billboard sensation in just a few months.

To highlight how much of a foothold TikTok has in this space, one of the first trends to emerge on Byte is about, well, TikTok. Scroll through the Popular page, and you’ll see Byte videos making fun of TikTok and warning newbies not to post their TikToks. One popular Byte video captioned “TikTok dancers trying to use Byte” shows the user starting to dance, but he stops awkwardly, because his six seconds are up. Sure, these Byte videos are dragging TikTok, but they probably wouldn’t be doing that if it wasn’t so popular in the first place.

Yet, Byte seems very aware of TikTok’s popularity and is working on a few ways to address that. One of TikTok’s features, for example, is the For You suggestions feed that pushes to the top the most popular or viral videos based on your use of the app. In comparison, Byte has a For Your Consideration video that pops up in your feed occasionally to help you discover new content. Hoffman said the team is working on a recommendation feed very similar to TikTok’s, which should help with reach. “We didn’t start with it because there wasn’t enough activity in beta to properly test it, but now we can,” he tweeted.

There are other, more unique features of Byte, too. You can change the app’s icon to one of nine styles, and you can set the camera to record by tapping anywhere on the screen. There’s also a unique point system of collecting “stars” for the more followers and views you get. Hoffman says this is for fun right now, but perhaps there could be more use for them later on.

Additionally, TikTok doesn’t currently have a way to help its content creators make money, while Byte, perhaps learning from Vine’s mistakes, has a partner program in the works. “Byte celebrates creativity and community, and compensating creators is one important way we can support both,” the company tweeted.

Importantly, Hoffman seems to understand that one of the most important parts of Vine was its community. It launched a Byte community forum alongside its announcement a couple of years ago, and Hoffman says the Byte team is fairly active in responding to users and finding out what features they want.

Still, it’s unclear if Byte can truly pick up where Vine left off. With Snapchat and Instagram Stories picking up the mantle for short ephemeral snippets, and TikTok, those viral memes, a simple six-second-video app might not be able to compete. Appetites for short videos may have changed, and Byte’s super-simple interface could be too dependent on creator imaginations, at least in its current incarnation. Plus, Byte has quite a few teething problems already; it often crashes during longer video edits, the Android version doesn’t let you block accounts and it’s currently inundated with spam bots.

Yet, Vine’s legacy could very well be reason enough for Byte to exist. In a world where so much of the internet is hostage to ad buys and sponsored content, it’s so refreshing to see an app like Byte that is dedicated to creativity, fun and just straight-up wackiness. That was what Vine delivered. It helped make the internet wonderful and weird. And perhaps that alone makes the Byte endeavor worthwhile.

Byte’s app store description notes: “Nostalgia is our starting point, but where we go next is up to you.” Here’s hoping it figures that out.



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IBM uses AI to predict progress of Huntington’s disease symptoms

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The existing understanding of the disease only indicates that symptoms tend to materialize between the ages of 30 and 50, not which symptoms and how they’ll evolve.

The researchers are “optimistic” that a single MRI scan could produce more accurate estimates of functional decline across multiple categories. It wouldn’t result in better treatment by itself, but it could help Huntington’s disease patients prepare for changes. It could also help scientists choose candidates for clinical trials based on the states of their disease. That, in turn, could lead to long-term solutions.

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This is the end of ‘Kentucky Route Zero’

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I interviewed Jake Elliott at GDC 2013, in between the debut of acts one and two, and I asked him about the game’s release schedule, its themes and its ending. Seven years later and on the eve of the final episode’s launch, I read bits of this interview back to the Cardboard Computer team.

Here, Elliott and Kemenczy react to their 2013 goals for Kentucky Route Zero, starting with the pledge to release all five episodes within one year:

This puts the final episode of Kentucky Route Zero out in January 2014, one year after the launch of episode one. “It’s pretty aggressive, but I think we’ve got our workflow down so well now that we feel good about it still,” Elliott says.

First, Elliott laughed. Then he said, “I think a lot of that was coming from a couple different things, one of which is obviously inexperience. I don’t know if it would have been possible to have any experience that would have prepared us for the way the project took shape. Very early on, we had this idea about this platformer, and we had all these mechanical constraints, like about a fixed number of levels and stuff. Even when that started to fall away and the game changed shape, I think we hung on to the idea of the scope somehow magically remaining the same, even though it was a different game underneath it.”

To hit this initial goal, the Cardboard Computer crew would’ve had to develop one episode every three to five months. Looking back, Elliott calls that plan absurd.

“We just physically couldn’t do it,” Elliott said. “We really put ourselves through a lot of pain there. Like, Tamas developed repetitive strain injuries in his wrists and stuff from making all the art for act two in such a short period of time.”

Kentucky Route Zero Act V

The only way the original schedule might-have-maybe worked would’ve been with a sudden infusion of cash-driven focus.

“Maybe if we had found a way to do it like that — I don’t know, maybe we would have taken on some investors and hired some more people or something,” Elliott said. “Or I don’t know, we could have maybe found some solutions to hit that timeframe. But it would’ve been a really different game, and I’m glad we were able to slow down a little bit.”

Next, I asked Elliott about the message behind the game. Back in 2013, he said it was all about our real-world capitalist dystopia:

At its heart, Kentucky Route Zero is a game about credit default swaps, payday loans, sub-prime mortgages and health insurance loopholes. Really. “It’s in there,” Elliott says. “Those are the esoteric devices that express themselves in some of the situations that you do, these people who are dealing with all these credit problems, dealing with debt. Those are these things that, by design, are too mysterious and we can’t understand them. In finance, they do that on purpose.”

“I probably played it up and was too specific about that stuff, but I don’t know,” Elliott said, pausing to consider the words of his ghost. “I still feel that way, through these weird esoteric instruments that just immiserate us from the darkness. It is a sort of supernatural experience to be getting these weird bills in the mail with all this magical writing on them that’s just going to fuck up your life for a little while. It’s sort of the way that this weird — structures and physical power and how they feel, you know?”

Kentucky Route Zero Act V

Game developers have a similar power, with the ability to shape a player’s reality and then impose hidden restrictions on it. Elliott continued, “I like tabletop games, too, but in video games, I like that you can have secret rules that the player doesn’t know about. You can’t really do that in a tabletop game because the players are the ones responsible for adjudicating the rules. But in a video game, you can do this weird, mysterious, mechanical stuff that the player maybe never understands.”

And finally, we talked about the end. In 2013, I asked Elliott if he knew how Kentucky Route Zero was going to conclude, and he said yes:

“It’s a tragedy,” Elliott says. “The story’s a tragedy, it’s a tragic ending. Hopefully it won’t be too bleak, but it’s in that tradition.”

Tamas Kemenczy answered this one first.

“There’s a tragic ending out of other endings, yeah,” he said. “There’s an ensemble cast in the game. You start with Conway as sort of the person that you are operating with, but very deliberately the end, it’s just an ensemble cast. Even by act four, you can get the sense that there’s a tragic ending for some of the characters.”

Elliott agreed, and then clarified that tragedy doesn’t equate hopelessness, in his mind.

“It’s not pessimistic to me. Tragedy is not pessimistic,” he said. “A lot of literary tragedies or dramatic tragedies, at the end the character who has made all these terrible mistakes or who has these terrible flaws… they usually have this moment where they sort of take responsibility for it, or in some other way transcend it. Spiritually, at least. Like Oedipus has this horrible disfiguration in the end, but he does it in order to sort of reconcile himself with fate, which was his mistake to start with.”

Kentucky Route Zero Act V

Tragedy is the logical conclusion to many of life’s paths, so it’s also infused in Kentucky Route Zero. In both places — in reality and on-screen — it’s eerily beautiful.

“Similarly in Kentucky Route Zero, the characters are put in these terrible positions,” Elliott said. “Conway gives himself over to this debt situation. But he’s also done something really good, because this community has formed around him, and then he’s moved himself out of the way in order for this community to thrive. That sort of built up around him. Tragedy can have a sad ending, but it doesn’t mean that things are hopeless.”

Sometimes, they’re just real.

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A Vermont bill would bring emoji license plates to the US

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The bill, introduced by Democrat Rebecca White, would allow drivers to add one of six emoji to their license plates. The pictographs would be in addition to whatever combination of letters and numbers the state’s Commissioner of Motor Vehicles assigns to a car or a driver picks for themselves. So you won’t have to worry about saying something like “thinking face, smiling face with heart-eyes and face with tears of joy” the next time you need to report a Vermont driver to police.

If the bill passes, Vermont would be the first state in the US to allow emoji on license plates — but not the first place in the world. According to NBC 5, that distinction goes to Queensland, Australia. As of last year, people in the country’s second-largest state have been able to add one of five emoji to their plates for about $336. Notably, Vermont hasn’t said how much it would charge for the plates, nor which six emoji drivers will be able to pick from. Just as importantly, it hasn’t decided if it will create its own take on the designs or use an existing repository. We would love to see the blob emoji make more of a comeback.

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Avast packaged detailed user data to be sold for millions of dollars

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The investigation incriminates a lot of big name companies. We don’t know for certain which are past, present or potential clients, but the list includes Expedia, Intuit, Keurig, Condé Nast, Sephora, Loreal and more. Microsoft said it doesn’t have a current relationship with the company. Yelp said Jumpshot was “engaged on a one-time basis,” and Google did not respond to Microsoft and PGMag‘s request for comment.

The data sold includes everything from Google searches, Google Maps location searches, activity on companies’ LinkedIn pages, YouTube video visits and data on people visiting porn websites. The data is supposedly anonymized and does not include personal information, like names or contact info, but experts fear that it could be possible to de-anonymize certain users.

One product Jumpshot markets is an “All Clicks Feed,” which tracks users’ clicks across websites in precise detail. It’s advertised as “Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.” At least one customer, New York-based marketing firm Omnicom Media Group, signed up for the tool. According to Motherboard and PCMag, Omnicom paid Jumpshot $2,075,000 for access to data in 2019.

This isn’t the first time Avast has run into data collection trouble. Just a couple months ago, Mozilla pulled Avast’s Online Security and SafePrice extensions for Firefox, as well as Avast’s AVG-branded equivalents, after they were found to be collecting much more data than necessary. Collecting and selling off this highly detailed info is especially troubling coming from Avast, a company whose primary function is to protect its users.

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Amazon is having a sale on all of its Fire TV streamers

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The new Fire TV Cube is also on offer with a decent discount: $100 instead of $120. Again, not the cheapest we’ve seen it (it dropped to $90 just before the holidays), but a great price for all the new features it packs in, such as support for Dolby Vision and HDR+, YouTube and YouTube TV. And you can use it as an Echo, too. We scored it 84 in our in-depth review.

If you’ve been on the fence about the Fire TV Recast, maybe Amazon’s latest discount will swing you — it’s on sale now for $145. That’s a pretty significant $85 saving on the usual $230 list price. The compact box offers both DVR and streaming features, giving cord cutters an option to watch and record network TV content and sports broadcasts as well as streaming services like Netflix or Hulu. There’s also Alexa integration and you can use the device with your mobile device (iOS and Android) as well as Fire TV, Echo Show or Fire Tablet. Again, this isn’t the cheapest we’ve seen it, but it is a hefty discount that’s not going to come around too often.

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Amazon slashes Echo Buds to $90

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Amazon’s Echo Buds have had their first ever price drop, and are now on sale for $90 instead of the usual $130. This AirPods alternative does a lot of things well: its customizable, the hands-free Alexa function works great – and the Buds are maybe a bit more inconspicuous than Apple’s offering. That said, their battery life isn’t as good and the sound quality has room for improvement, hence our score of 73. Nonetheless, they are usually the more affordable choice, and this deep discount makes them even more attractive.

Buy Echo Buds on Amazon – $90

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Watch the first full trailer for Netflix’s divisive ‘Ghost in the Shell’ series

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The 3DCG animation style — the first for a Ghost in the Shell production — has proved to be divisive, with more thumbs-down than thumbs-up votes on the original teaser trailer. That could be because it varies dramatically from the original hand-drawn anime style, to put it generously.

What folks can be more excited about is the return of the original anime cast and the fact that it will also be directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) and Shinji Aramaki (Appleseed). That’s key because the films have always been just as much about the dystopic storytelling as the animation style.

The SAC-2045 title refers to Stand Alone Complex, the well-received 2002 anime series written and directed by Kamiyama. That series was set in 2032, so with the new series happening in 2045, it could be a loose sequel.

While the original film and series were financial and cultural successes (having inspired movies like The Matrix), the first crack at it as a live action movie starring Scarlett Johansson proved to be a flop. Cultural appropriation aside, that film had dazzling visuals but critics generally felt it lacked the highly original storytelling from the anime source material. If Netflix’s series can deliver that, then maybe the 3DCG animation style will bother folks less.

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Nintendo will stop repairing Wii consoles in March

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Nintendo’s Wii has had a phenomenal run since its 2006 launch, selling more than 101 million consoles across its seven-year lifespan. Now, years after it was supplanted by the Wii U and then the Switch, Nintendo is announcing that it’ll no longer service your damaged Wiis. If you’ve been sleeping on getting a unit fixed, then better hurry up, since it’ll stop accepting new units on March 31st.

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