YouTube 's new short-form video service, YouTube Shorts, will soon be available in over 100 countries after being trialed in selected markets. It has been developed as a competitor for the popular TikTok platform and was first released in India for beta testing earlier this year where its uptake tripled over several months. YouTube is essentially playing catch-up with its popular TikTok competitor but also aims to integrate its Shorts offering with the wider YouTube platform as a key method for attracting new users and expanding its reach.

YouTube Shorts

The YouTube Shorts service provides functions for producing short video content that are very similar to its TikTok competitor. It allows users to record, edit and share video content that can be up to 60 seconds in length and also allows popular music to be included. Users have access to a range of tools that allow them to start and stop recording with a single tap with the service offering a small number of editing features. These include controls that allow the audio to be sped up or slowed down, a countdown timer, the ability to insert text overlays at chosen points and the ability to adjust colors.

TikTok Comparison

While YouTube shorts offers a convenient tool for choosing music to be used in the video it does not have the automatic sound synchronization feature of TikTok which made the app more accessible and popular with first-time users. In addition, YouTube's offering lacks the wide catalog of special effects that TikTok offers - such as augmented reality functions and the ability to use a green-screen. YouTube Shorts, like Instagram Reels and other competitors, are seeking to make the features of TikTok available to users that want to create and publish short video content on their social media platforms.

The US Commerce Department has announced that it is rescinding a decision made to place Chinese owned TikTok and WeChat on a list of applications that were prohibited from transactions by US citizens. The ban was issued in September of last year by the Trump administration in a bid to stop any additional downloads of the apps.

Presidential Executive Orders

President Joe Biden recently withdrew a number of executive orders by the previous president that sought to block any new downloads of the apps which are owned by the Chinese company Tencent and ordered the Commerce Department to conduct a review of any security concerns posed by these and other Chinese-made apps. The previous administration had established the so-called 'TikTok ban' in response to concerns about data being gathered on US citizens by China and also sought to ban transactions with other apps, including WeChat, which would have effectively banned their use in the US. WeChat has reportedly been downloaded by more than 19 million users in the US and has become a widely used platform for payments, services and games. Biden's new executive order revokes the bans against WeChat and TikTok as well as against another eight communication and financial software applications.

While Biden's executive order rescinded the bans, it nonetheless directed the Commerce Department to continue monitoring applications like TikTok to determine whether they could impact US national security. It also ordered the department to present recommendations within 120 days that would help to protect US data acquired or made available to companies controlled by other foreign adversaries.

National Security Concerns

TikTok remains one of the world's most popular social media apps and China's foreign ministry welcomed the move as a positive move urging the US to respect the free market and not to use so-called national security concerns to suppress China's tech industry. The effort by the Trump administration to effectively ban various Chinese apps had led to numerous legal challenges which had the effect of heightening tensions between the two countries. Last year a US district court judge granted a temporary injunction to TikTok that blocked the effort to ban downloading the app. At the time Trump had approved a bid by US tech company Oracle (backed by Walmart) to purchase TikTok but the move failed to gain approval from China's regulators. The app is believed to have more than 1 billion users world wide and is particularly popular with younger users.

For a very long time there has been a bit of a standoff between musicians and their legions of fans who'd like nothing better than to use a bit of their favorite song in their own video productions. Rights have been hard to secure and prohibitively priced to the point where most content creators just don't try obtaining them or go guerrilla and hope they don't get caught for a long time. That logjam seems to finally be breaking loose and the dammed-up river of creative content is about to become a torrent.

TikTok Universal Music Group Agreement

Recently, content platform TikTok has announced an agreement with music rights management behemoth Universal Music Group that permits TikTok users to access all, repeat: all, of UMGs content. This follows on the heels of several other agreements with firms such as Sony and Warner. Unlike notoriously-restrictive YouTube, TikTok has apparently decided to partner up with its content providers rather than rigorously police them for rights violations where everybody ends up the loser.

TikTok Revenue

Musicians can now get an extra stream of revenue for their work. Content providers now have access to high-quality material to enhance the production qualities of their output, and the large corporate entities which stand on both sides of the divide now have a perfect win-win situation for their own bottom lines.

Of course the devil is always in the details, but TikTok's aggressive pursuit of access to what appears to be all music everywhere signals that it wants to be the premier place for content creators worldwide. On the face of it, it seems that creators can now access these rights virtually automatically. How the TikTok Universal full catalog arrangement provides payment with the rights holders is not clear at the moment, but it appears that they are paying for the music rights on behalf of all their users and then getting repaid out of the profits generated from viral content.

The real question now is whether other content platforms will follow TikTok's example or are already doing so. With the near-simultaneous news that UMG has pulled access from TikTok competitor Triller, there is likely to be some significant deal-making action among other industry players in the near future. The possibility of bidding wars heating up cannot be discounted either if this proves to be a highly profitable move by TikTok.

Reddit recently announced its first major acquisition with purchase of Dubsmash, a TikTok-like social media site where users upload short-form videos. While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Dubsmash recently raised $20.2 million from investors including Heartcore Capital, Lowercase Capital, Sunstone Life and Index Ventures among others.

From what has been publicly revealed about the deal, Dubsmash will continue to operate as a separate platform. The driver for the purchase is to integrate Dubsmash's video creation tools into Reddit which, while it has supported video uploads since 2017, has limited video editing tools with the videos posted on the site often hosted elsewhere.

All About Dubsmash

Dubsmash was launched in 2015 as a video app where users could lip-sync to popular music. It struggled in the first few years of its existence but in 2007 it pivoted to become a full social media platform and moved its operations from Berlin to Brooklyn. Since then it has seen increased popularity and now has the largest share of the US short-form video market aside from the leader TikTok, based on app installs. Reportedly Dubsmash also held talks with Facebook and Snap about a possible acquisition before the Reddit deal was inked.

About Reddit

Reddit was founded in 2005 in San Francisco and bought by Conde Nast the following year. In 2011 it was sold, though the parent company of Conde Nast, Advance Publications, retains a stake. Last year it raised some $300m in funding from range of investors, including Sequoia Capital and Andrew Horowitz, valuing it at over $3 billion. The company has 700 employees compared to Dubsmash's 12.

One of the distinguishing features of Dubsmash is that it has a large user base of Black and Latinx users who are credited as the main reason for the site's success. TikTok's highest profile stars are white and the New York times published an article earlier this year claiming dance moves by Black creators on the site were often appropriated by TikTok users without giving credit to the original creators which meant that they missed out on larger followings and brand deals as a result. Reddit said in a statement that it regarded the purchase of the company as a part of a greater effort on its part to be more inclusive - the company has faced criticism in the past for racism after allowing hate-speech to be hosted on the site.

According to Business Insider, a sponsored post on TikTok can make an average of $0.01 to $0.02 per view. Loren Gray, a famous TikTok user, earned $2.6 million in 2019 for creating sponsored posts. Companies are paying TikTok influencers between $200 and $20,000 per branded video promoted.

If you have thousands of TikTok followers, you should consider monetizing your account. You might want to know how to monetize your TikTok account. The following tips will help.

1. Influencer Marketing

In influencer marketing, you use your TikTok videos to promote brands/products/services. You endorse products in your videos with the hope of generating sales.

The highest TikTok earners engage in influencer marketing and some of them earn six figures. To succeed in influencer marketing, you need to have an engaged user base. You can only influence people to make purchasing decisions if you can engage them.

The TikTok influencer calculator will help you to estimate your possible influencer earnings based on your number of followers and engagement.

2. Publishing Sponsored Posts

You can earn money by publishing promotional videos of brands in your account. With an average earning of $0.01 to $0.02 per sponsored view, a video of 100,000 views will earn $1000 in sponsorships.

If you have a following on TikTok, you should consider reaching out to brands and informing them how you can market their products using sponsored posts.

3. Selling Your Products

This is the easiest way to monetize your TikTok account if you don't have a huge following. You can use TikTok to promote products that you are already selling elsewhere.

TikTok offers you a free platform to sell your products or services. If for example, you own a river rafting service, you can take 15-second clips of raft trips and post them on TikTok.

TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms out today. From trending dances to sketch comedies, social media influencers are really finding creative ways to make great content, brand themselves, and earn livable salaries. Still, the social media platform has not been without its challenges and controversy.

What Is TikTok and Why Is TikTok US In the Throes of Political Discourse

TikTok, in many ways, is like the popular Vine app we had a few years ago. Like Vine, TikTok is a video social media app where 'real short videos' take center-stage. The short-form video app has been the source of viral dances that have taken pop songs up the Billboard charts, as well as spearheaded viral political activism and satirical content. It is the virality of its content that has added to the app's popularity and rapid rise within the pop culture digital dynamic.

All things considered (including the shareability of its content to just about every other popular social media platform), all is good and well in the world of TikTok. Well, except for its owner, that is. The TikTok app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. The concern is that user data can be handed over to the Chinese government if so required. The owners of TikTok has pointed to the fact that they are against such practices and would not hand over user data at the request of the Chinese or any other government. Still, the United States (US) government considers the app to be a national security threat and commands that the app owner meet the outlined requirements of risk being banned in the US.

The Ultimatum: The Only Solution the Trump Administration Will Accept

Even with the best efforts of the owners of TikTok to reassure the US government and other critics that the app does not use spy technologies nor is it a threat to national security, the Trump administration has laid down the gauntlet. The ultimatum is simply this, be banned in the US or be owned by a US company with user data being held and controlled on US soil - far from access by foreign governments and espionage. With the option to be US-owned, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

If you are a fan of Instagram then you already know you can find goods and services via this social networking website. Many business owners advertise their products here and they have excellent reasons to do this. With over 500 million visitors daily, Instagram has the potential to bring serious business to your site. It gets even better. According to reliable statistics, over 130 million Instagram users engage with shopping posts. These are some big numbers right there.

In the past, Instagram users had to leave the site then log on to the seller's website in order to buy goods and services online. Now, this is an inconvenience and a waste of valuable time. The good news is that customers can now buy goods and services directly from Instagram without leaving the site or navigating to the seller's website. BigCommerce has teamed up with Facebook to unlock checkout on Instagram. In simple English, this means that if you are just looking at Instagram pages and you see any product you like, you can buy it immediately without having to log out of Instagram and log on to the seller's website. Below are three advantages of this innovative development.

Meet Customers Where They Are

One of the best things about shopping online is that the seller offers goods and services to the customers in real time. You do not have to commute to some offline shop somewhere and waste valuable time in traffic. Now, checkout on Instagram offers online shoppers instant availability of products. For the 130 million shoppers on Instagram, this feature means that the seller meets the customer where they are. In effect, you have a safe, fast and convenient shopping alternative right here on Instagram.

Simple and Secure Platform

This innovation creates a wonderful social media shopping experience for Instagram users. You probably had some favorite products already but you could not access these products directly in the past. Now, BigCommerce has just given you the opportunity to shop for all your favorite brands directly from your Instagram page. You can even store payment credentials and make future purchases seamlessly on Instagram. This gives you fast, secure and simple transactions all the time. 

The net is full of fraudulent software, including PC Health Boost, which claim to boost the performance of your PC by removing errors in its registry. For the uninitiated, PC Health Boost is a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Program) that does not deliver what it claims. On the contrary, it provides users with exaggerated and modified system scan results to fool them into paying money for the unnecessary system fix. It does not matter if this software sneaked into your computer through installation of software bundles or whether you installed it intentionally. The trial version of this software begins scanning your computer as soon as you install it, and displays a lot of pop-up notification that identifies allegedly PC problems. It displays a message that impel you to get rid of or fix the following items:
• Errors related to ActiveX and COM controls
• Expired cache files
• Damaged DLLs, and
• Potentially dangerous entries

The catch with PC Health Boost

The trial version of the software just shows you the errors. You have to purchase a license key and register the application with it to fix the errors. Although the vendors promise that this software eliminates outdated registry entries from your computer's hard disk drive, it might be able to delete scores of legitimate registry files. It also steals data such as credit card details, bank account information, tax return, user ID and password from your computer and forward them to hackers. Therefore, you should remove this program from your computer immediately.

How to remove PC Health Boost from your computer

Running a standard anti-spyware removal tool is of no help since the powerful destructive feature of PC Health Boost effortlessly manages to bypass such tools. In such a scenario you can try to uninstall the software by following the steps mentioned below:
• Click on "Start" button
• Navigate to the Windows control panel
• Launch add/remove programs
• Select PC Health Boost and click to uninstall it

Minecraft is one of the most popular computer games worldwide and new themes, enhancements of Minecraft are always being released. In one of the most significant changes in visual effects for Minecraft in many years, Microsoft will collaborate with graphics card manufacturer, Nvidia to create a special version of Minecraft with Nvidia RTX ray tracing. This enhanced visually attractive version of Minecraft will be released on April 16, 2020 and is eagerly awaited by Minecraft fans worldwide. In this version Nvidia will use drivers, its upgraded RTX graphics card and a specially created version of Minecraft with light ray tracing, to give a realistic look for the game.

Nvidia Geforce RTX20

In most computer games, including Minecraft, the conventional graphics technologies which are used allow the game designer limited control over the illumination and colors displayed on the screen. For more realistic colors using ray tracing, a high capacity graphics processor and software will be required, which are not easily available. To overcome this limitation of Minecraft, Nvidia has released the Nvidia Geforce RTX20 series graphics card with specially designed Graphics Processor Unit (GPU). This card is using the Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS 2.0) technology for ray tracing without affecting the performance of the game, computer.

Artificial Intelligence Tensor Cores

The Nvidia RTX GPUs are using Artificial intelligence (AI) tensor cores and machine learning, to render life like and realistic visuals. The rendering technique uses super resolution using AI, in which a few pixels are rendered in the conventional way. Then AI is used to construct high resolution images which are sharper. The frames are also being generated at a faster rate. All the illumination effects like shadows, atmospheric effects, reflections, refraction,transparency, scattering, are created using this technology. Since AI is being used extensively for rendering the graphics, the load on the GPU and CPU, power consumption is lower compared to other hardware used earlier.

For the convenience of the users, Minecraft and Nvidia are releasing specially developed textures which showcase the enhanced visual effects, collaborating with different creators. The six textures are Temples & Totems from Razzleberries, Imagination Island developed by Blockworks, Crystal Palace by Gemini Tay, Aquatic Adventure by Dr. Bond, Color, light & shadows by Pearlescentmoon, Neon district from Elysium Fire. These adventure, creative and other themes can be downloaded from the Minecraft marketplace by graphic designers developing their own themes or Minecraft players who wish to enhance their gaming experience.

Announcing Minecraft with RTX for Windows 10

As diseases such as COVID-19 ravage around the world the average person might wonder just what they can do to help in combating it, luckily for us there are many ways however an effective and rather not intrusive way is via the program Folding@Home.

What is Folding@Home?

Folding@Home launched on October the 1st of 2000 is a program that is available on many Personal Computers that uses your idle processing resources in order to help simulate processes such as Protein Folding, hence the name Folding@Home. Using the Idle resources of thousands of volunteer computers, Folding@Home has helped achieve massive scientific advancements in the field of dealing with diseases while also breaking world records for technology-related achievements such as being one of the worlds fastest computing systems rated at 98.7 petaflops, which for the less tech-literate of us is very, very quick.

Can I get it on my PC?

If you are hooked on the idea of helping the world by letting a scientific company use your unwanted Idle CPU processes then you may wonder on whether or not your computer will support it. Luckily, specifications aren't much of a concern and it will most likely run on anything that can at least boot up without crashing, meaning you could put all your old laptops to good use by installing Folding@Home on them.

Luckily, Folding@Home now is pretty much universally compatible with all major operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS, Most Major Linux Distros (such as Ubuntu) as well as even phone operating systems such as Android (though it has to be version 4.4 and above). What this means is that you can put any device with these operating systems to use to help us fight against diseases, from using it on your Windows Gaming PC to letting it use your phone's CPU while it is in your pocket.

How do I start using my computer for folding?

Now you know that your device most likely supports Folding@Home you might now wonder on just about how you install it on to your device. Luckily, it is very (I mean very) simple and is about as complicated as downloading any other application.

If you are on a Personal Computer with Windows, Mac or Linux then all you have to do is head to foldingathome.org, find your operating system in the download list and click "Download". Simple as that, follow the setup and then you will have Folding@Home installed on your PC, simple as that.

For Android, all you have to do is go on Google Play and download it from there.

How can this application fight against modern diseases (like COVID-19)

Folding@Home has been helping scientists do revolutionary advances against many modern diseases ever since 2000, and for diseases like COVID-19, Folding@Home plays an important part in helping researchers utilize the necessary computer power in order to help simulate and research the Virus.

Saving Lives with Your PC Hardware - Folding@Home - NGON