Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Musical.ly's growth and controversy. It's the Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7 2016 By Darrell Etherington

The Daily Crunch 12/7/16

Crowdsourcing your video news, Musical.ly's age anxieties and AI's mastery over Civilization. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for December 7, 2016. And if you're a child hearing this newsletter through a conversation with a talking toy, stop that right now.

1. Seenit wins the Disrupt Cup

TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016 just wrapped up, and the winner was Seenit, a video platform that combines footage captured by a group of users that can be specified by any organization. It's kind of like having your own roving reporter pool or b-roll shooters.

The platform is indeed cool, and has already been used by some big news and media organizations for a different kind of coverage. It'd be nice if it could automatically suggest content that might be most interesting, too, but that might come later.

2. Musical.ly has 40M monthly active users

Social app Musical.ly has a lot of MAUs for an app as young as it is, with 40 million people using it at least once a month. On the Disrupt London stage, the company's founder defended the network against accusations that it knowingly hosts a number of young users who are perhaps over-sexualizing themselves. Instagram has similar problems, he noted, which is definitely true.

3. Fab founder Jason Goldberg dips back into the funding pool

Fab founder Jason Goldberg hasn't really had a standout success, despite booting up a number of startups. Still, Goldberg's raising a seed round from investors for his new startup Pepo, and backers of his previous ventures are coming back for more despite not having any big payouts to show for having done so before.

4. This AI can probably beat you at Civilization

World building sims are incredibly addictive, and Civilization is definitely that. Arago's HIRO AI can play Freesim, the popular free version of Sid Meier's original, and it can play it so well it can beat not only all difficulties of computer players, but also up to 80 percent of the human players it encounters, too.

5. Trump's tech tête-à-tête

President elect Donald Trump is going to hold a meeting with the top leaders in tech. We don't know what this might look like or who's on the invitee list, but you can probably guess at invitees. The question will be how willing they are to play ball with Trump, given his questionable stances with respect to everything from Apple's manufacturing practices to data privacy.

6. Talking toys are best avoided

Toys that hold conversations might not be the best idea, according to a new complaint by consumer watchdog groups. That's mostly because a lot of these toys use speech recognition services that don't necessarily have a tight policy on privacy, which could lead to exposure risk for the content.

7. Oculus Touch's Wii Sports equivalent is a bit less accessible

Oculus Touch is here, and with it – games. VR Sports Challenge is kind of like its own Wii Sports, but Fitz found that while true sports fans will love it, more casual players might find it harder to get in the game.

Get more stories at techcrunch.com 

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