Clubhouse

By Yingzhi Yang, Pei Li and Brenda Goh(Reuters) - TikTok owner ByteDance is working on a Clubhouse-like app for China, sources familiar with the matter said, as the global success of the U.S.-based audio chat service inspires a rush of copycats in the country.At least a dozen similar apps have been launched in the past month, with momentum picking up after Clubhouse was blocked in China in early February. Clubhouse had seen a surge in users who participated in discussions on sensitive topics such as Xinjiang detention camps and Hong Kong independence.New offerings include Xiaomi Corp's reworking of its Mi Talk app into an invitation-only audio service targeted at professionals last week. More are currently under development, industry executives say.ByteDance's plans are still in the early stages, said two sources who were not authorised to speak to media and declined to be identified.Discussions about TikTok and ByteDance on Clubhouse had prompted interest in the genre from ByteDance executives including CEO Zhang Yiming, said one of the sources.  » Read More

Business FILE PHOTO: The ByteDance logo is seen in this illustration taken, November 27, 2019. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo 04 Mar 2021 03:15PM (Updated: 04 Mar 2021 03:18PM) REUTERS: TikTok owner ByteDance is working on a Clubhouse-like app for China, sources familiar with the matter said, as the global success of the US-based audio chat service inspires a rush of copycats in the country.At least a dozen similar apps have been launched in the past month, with momentum picking up after Clubhouse was blocked in China in early February. Clubhouse had seen a surge in users who participated in discussions on sensitive topics such as Xinjiang detention camps and Hong Kong independence. New offerings include Xiaomi Corp's reworking of its Mi Talk app into an invitation-only audio service targeted at professionals last week. More are currently under development, industry executives say.ByteDance's plans are still in the early stages, said two sources who were not authorised to speak to media and declined to be identified.Discussions about TikTok and ByteDance on Clubhouse had prompted interest in the genre from ByteDance executives including CEO Zhang Yiming,  » Read More

Thanks to those who joined us for the first episode of our Clubhouse Speaking Series, "Welcome to the Future: Legal Issues with Using Clubhouse"! We had great fun and a great turnout, and we look forward to entering the Club again in just a few weeks. Given the ephemeral nature of the platform, we wanted to memorialize some key takeaways from the room: We Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet. It's important to remember that even though Clubhouse is valued at $1 billion and has 10 million subscribers and counting, the app is currently in beta form. We expect major changes to the platform, so we will all have to watch closely over the coming months to see how it evolves. Rumors include developments like ticketed talks, subscriptions, the ability to tip your speakers, an influencer program and more! It’s Apparently Not Meant to Be Used for Commercial Purposes. Huh? As of now, according to its terms, Clubhouse is not intended to be used for commercial purposes or advertising.  » Read More

One of Turkey’s biggest large-scale consumer technology brands, Sunny, unveiled its new product Wednesday in a launch dubbed a first worldwide in terms of the technology it provides. The company, which defines itself as a research and development (R&D) firm and has been allocating large sums for R&D activates, has developed the SeeTalk after two years of work. It is a prompter combined microphone device that came just at a time when people around the world need their voice to be heard amid a pandemic that restricted many activities, according to Arif Yıldırım, the Sunny electronic marketing and product category director who spoke during the meeting. Saying that the company produces high-technology products and employs over 1,500 employees, Yıldırım noted that they have closed the pandemic year of 2020 with double-digit growth figures and that will continue to allocate important funding for R&D activities in the coming term as it allows them to maintain productivity and innovation which are key to reach sustainable growth. The newly launched device, with a price tag of TL 3,499 ($474),  » Read More

Clubhouse might be the new kid on the social media block, but it’s already been downloaded an estimated 10m times globally since its launch in April 2020. Now, life before the invite-only audio app seems like a distant memory. What did we do with our evenings before entering its ‘rooms’,Hoping to hear SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk discussing life on Mars, or Lindsay Lohan talking to blogger Perez Hilton? In 2021, nothing gets a topic trending on Twitter quite like a Clubhouse chat.The app is the brainchild of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Paul Davison and ex-Google employee Rohan Seth, and while it’s still in the beta-testing stage, it’s helped satiate lockdown boredom, replacing Instagram deep-dives with moderated talks and discussions. Listeners can opt in and out of rooms created by hosts and guest speakers—one minute you might find yourself in one with Drake, the next you might be auditioning for a part in the hit musical Hamilton (true story).  » Read More

Just eight days after being shut down, Xiaomi’s instant messaging app MiTalk announced a comeback. The Chinese smartphone giant on Saturday said it would turn the app into an invite-only audio chat platform for professionals — akin to Clubhouse, the viral app that was banned in China. “MiTalk, begin again,” the company said in a notice posted on Weibo. “The new MiTalk is an audio chat app for professionals. Here, you can listen to sharing and insights of professionals in various industries, and you can also ‘raise your hand’ to participate in the sharing. At the same time, you can create topics of interest to you,” the description read, adding that a small number of users have already received an invitation for beta testing. MiTalk will be a completely brand-new product and there are no plans to transfer previous accounts and data. Following a 10-year run, MiTalk went offline on Feb. 19. The IM app failed to gain traction among Chinese users and lost to Tencent’s WeChat, which has 1.09 billion daily active users.  » Read More

Clubhouse, the drop-in audio chat app, has shot to fame in no time and has managed to get the attention of famous names like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg with its unique platform.However, there are significant privacy concerns that have been raised by a report from Inc's Jason Aten, citing Clubhouse policies that are available to the public. For starters, Clubhouse indeed records conversations. One of the app's biggest highlights is having a room full of speakers and an audience who want to discuss some topics and the exchange being on the platform for a brief period and never being available again as a recording.The audio app says that the recordings are temporary and done for supporting incident investigations. Here's what Clubhouse policy states, "Solely for the purpose of supporting incident investigations, we temporarily record the audio in a room while the room is live. If a user reports a Trust and Safety violation while the room is active, we retain the audio for the purposes of investigating the incident,  » Read More

Photo: DPA The new social network Clubhouse with voice communication at the core, or conversations in “rooms” as they are called, is gaining popularity. The platform gives the opportunity to ask questions to famous speakers, from Elon Musk to Oleg Tinkov. The network has already been banned in China, where it was used to discuss politics without censorship, and Clubhouse itself has already banned Russian television and radio host Vladimir Solovyov. Tatarstan entrepreneurs interviewed by Realnoe Vremya have already tried out the new resource and were satisfied with the results: first of all, the messenger removes barriers between people, dramatically “reducing the cost” of the opportunity to talk to any speaker directly. They are confident that the creators of Clubhouse will gain a foothold in the market, but for this, the company will have to monetise its audience. New messenger of pandemic era The coronavirus pandemic has given humanity not only many problems, but also new opportunities. In its wake, the most unusual startups and projects are becoming popular. At the height of the lockdown last spring,  » Read More

Shay Rowbottom Shay Rowbottom The tiny little drop-in audio app called Clubhouse is still making waves, and it’s not so tiny any longer. Case in point: I recently invited a few influencers like Shay Rowbottom to join a Clubhouse chat and noticed how a crowd gathered quickly. We’re talking about a few hundred people or so, but that’s far more than I’ve noticed during a few pitch meetings I’ve had in recent weeks.  Shay talked about what it means to be an influencer today, the need for authenticity, and how growing her platform on LinkedIn (which is about 600,000 strong now) was really an exercise in due diligence. She tends to produce videos that are wonderfully insightful and often funny, so I’m eager to see what she can do on Clubhouse. Another luminary named Alexa Carlin spoke during the chat about how being an influencer requires that you have something to influence people about in the first place. Will Huff,  » Read More

Photo of Iphone screen with Clubhouse application from February 28, 2020. Photo: Dilan Sirwan / Rudaw.  » Read More