The Wall Street Journal reports that investigations show ByteDance has largely turned around its business since 2021, when it suffered an operating loss of about $7 billion (currently about RMB 51.17 billion).

In addition, according to a financial report shared by Byte with employees, although its revenue continues to grow – up more than 38% in 2022 to reach $85.2 billion (currently about RMB 622.812 billion), the company’s revenue growth is about the same as one year ago. It has slowed down compared to before, when it grew by nearly 80%. Reports show the company generated operating profits of more than $20 billion (currently about RMB 146.2 billion) last year.

ByteDance also offered to buy back shares from current employees at $160 per share (currently about RMB 1,170), according to people familiar with the matter. ByteDance has 1.4 billion outstanding shares, which means it is valued at $223.5 billion (currently about RMB 1.63 trillion). That’s down nearly 26% from $300 billion a year ago, according to a previous Wall Street Journal report.

TikTok launched its e-commerce service in the United States in August. The company hopes TikTok e-commerce will bring in more revenue, people familiar with the matter said.

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According to Tech Planet, Bytedance’s internal beta dialogue AI project has started testing, code-named Grace. At present, the website for testing has been preliminarily set up and can only be used after logging in with an invited or authorized account.

According to reports, Grace’s test website is grace-bot.cn, which currently provides email, Gmail, and Feishu account logins, but authorization is required.

At this stage, users can like, dislike, or regenerate the words generated by Grace to help them improve their answering ability. At the same time, it also supports the need of generating pictures from text, but “there is still room for improvement.” In this regard, the relevant person in charge of ByteDance told Tech Planet, “The current product is not yet mature, and it is still in the internal testing stage, and there is still a big gap compared with leading foreign models.”

Through actual testing, ordinary users still cannot log in at this stage.

Grace first reported the start of internal testing in June this year, and ByteDance’s Toutiao, Douyin and other products have launched functions such as painting and special effects based on AIGC (Generative AI) . In the field of generative AI, after ChatGPT attracted global attention, major domestic companies followed up or showed strong interest.

At present, many domestic Internet companies have officially announced their own generative AI products, such as Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan, Ali’s Tongyi Qianwen, HKUST Xunfei’s Xinghuo Cognitive AI model, etc., have already launched external tests.

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It is worth mentioning that Lemon8, which had never entered the US Top 200 before, has taken the whole US by storm in just two months. On the App Store, Lemon8 has a rating of 4.4 out of 5 and is ranked first on the lifestyle chart.

Lemon8 was first launched in Japan in March 2020 and quickly became the largest lifestyle-sharing community in Japan and Southeast Asia. In March this year, Lemon8 entered the European and American markets and has also had success.

According to Apptopia, an app information provider, Lemon8 has been downloaded 16 million times worldwide since its launch, with Japan accounting for the largest number of downloads at 38% of the total. Apptopia, however, does not track data on Lemon8’s U.S. downloads but estimates that the app has up to 4.25 million monthly active users.

Lemon8 is reportedly attracting users through ad placements, creator incentives, and social media promotions, with global marketing planned for May.

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Caption: Video editing application CapCut

CapCut, a video editing tool that helps people quickly create online videos and memes, has seen more downloads in recent weeks than TikTok, which is under scrutiny in the United States over user data. CapCut allows people to edit videos easily with various templates, filters, visual effects and music.

Users say CapCut helps them create more professional-looking videos that are more likely to go viral on Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube.

Launched in 2020, CapCut has seized the opportunity of the wave of short videos. Shanghai-based mobile app analytics platform Diandian Data says CapCut currently has more than 200 million monthly active users. By comparison, TikTok has more than 1 billion users worldwide.

CapCut soared to the top of the app store charts late last year and hovered near the top of the weekly U.S. app download charts, according to app trackers such as Sensor Tower. In addition, a wave of other Chinese apps have continued to top the U.S. app charts, including TikTok, cross-border shopping platform Temu and Shein.

Global downloads of CapCut grew 43 percent last year to more than 400 million, according to Sensor Tower. About 7% of CapCut’s global downloads since last year came from the United States.

In its privacy policy, CapCut said that in order to provide its services, it collects content such as photos and videos uploaded by users, as well as data such as user location, gender and birthday, which is common in video editing tools. CapCut said it stores this data in the United States and Singapore, like TikTok. The app declined further comment.

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G42, which is controlled by UAE royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, acquired more than $100 million in private equity from existing investors in recent months through its 42XFund, and another fund bought ByteDive later at a valuation of $225 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The company’s investment in ByteDance has been very successful.

However, a source close to ByteDance told 24/7 that at the company level, “Byte has no new financing actions or plans in the near future.

According to the report, Sheikh Tanun has a wide portfolio of investments through G42, covering various fields such as cloud computing, vaccines and driverless cars. Last year, he set up the artificial intelligence firm 42XFund for $10 billion, which led to more funding for investing in technology companies in emerging markets.

Notably, the firm recently hired Jason Hu, former head of investment at Jingdong, to expand in Asia. a spokeswoman for G42 said the 42X Fund has hired 10 investment professionals in Shanghai, Singapore and Jakarta, but declined to elaborate further.

Hu joined Jingdong in 2019 after serving as a managing director at CDH Capital and a managing partner at Kaihui Private Equity, according to his LinkedIn profile. Earlier in his career, he also worked as an adviser at Bain & Company.

Bloomberg believes the Middle Eastern firm may be looking at the long-term potential of ByteDaily, as the tech giant has risen in an environment of continued crackdowns.

Since the debut of ChatGPT, enthusiasm for the AI side of the equation has grown, and ByteDance pioneered innovative algorithms in AI even a decade ago, thereby enthralling users with the most engaging content. 42XFund representatives declined to comment. A spokesperson for ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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LinuxBoot is a free software project that aims to replace most of the driver execution environment modules in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface firmware with the Linux kernel.

Initiated by Google, LinuxBoot has been promoted as a Linux Foundation project in the past few years, and more and more large-scale enterprises are interested in this project.

ByteDance and Lenovo see LinuxBoot as “a powerful firmware solution with many potential benefits.” In the presentation, it stated that it wants to support more application scenarios, and there is still a lot of work to be done.

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TikTok has been in contact with U.S. officials responsible for national security issues in an attempt to avoid being banned in the United States. Previously, Erich Andersen (Erich Andersen), the general counsel of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, was responsible for working with US officials to try to find a compromise that would allow TikTok to continue to be used in the US while protecting US user data. Anderson lost that role last fall, people familiar with the matter said.

A TikTok spokesperson responded by saying: “Eric’s remit has changed to enable him to focus more deeply on the company’s legal, trust and safety efforts.” It is unclear who replaced Anderson. TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, Michael Beckerman, remains in that role.

Meanwhile, TikTok is awaiting a review decision from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (Cfius). The committee is a government panel focused on the risks posed by foreign control of domestic firms. The review process has stalled at the Justice Department in recent months and faced public criticism from the FBI. Anderson will continue to lead the collaboration with Cfius, the people said.

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The Pico 4 is similar in design to previous Pico products, with a self-contained, standalone design that can also be connected to a PC. the Pico 4 is smaller and lighter than the Pico Neo3 Link released in May, weighing 295 grams without the strap and 586 grams with the strap. it uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 processor, Adreno 650 GPU, but uses a larger 8GB of RAM and a higher resolution display. The Pico4 is described as using the hot Pancake optical solution and comes with a 4K+ level ultra-visual screen with a PPI (pixel density) of 1200 and a refresh rate of 90Hz for a clear and detailed display. Two storage versions are available: a 128GB version for €429 and a 256GB version for €499. Officials say a single charge will provide about three hours of use, and like previous Pico headsets, the battery is built into the back strap for balance.

Pico 4 uses inside-out tracking, which eliminates the need for external devices to locate the device. Equipped with Pico 4 motion grip (with vibration function) and four external cameras, in addition, the device will offer full-color see-through capabilities.

At the event, Pico announced partnerships with Ruins Magus, Gorn and a number of other games, notably Pico’s announcement that it will launch Just Dance with Ubisoft, a game that will be exclusive to Pico and is expected to launch in 2023. Pico Fitness is also launching a VR version of its wrestling classes with Lami and VR fitness content with fitness sensation Pamela. Pico has also announced that it will launch its own social platform, Project Pico World, in 2023, and has partnered with Discovery for video content.

On the software side, the Pico 4 comes with PICO OS 5.0, which is capable of multitasking, gesture screenshots, video recording, optional sound-to-text, and more. Another highlight is that PICO has incorporated the avatar function into PICO OS 5.0. By adjusting 80 parameters, users can customize their own avatars and interact with other users in multiple games, fitness scenarios and PICO Worlds virtual social platform.

Pico 4 will be available in Japan, Korea and 13 European countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, and will be released in China on September 27, with launches in Singapore and Malaysia later this year.

PICO also offers the PICO 4 Pro high-end version, designed for advanced users and developers. PICO 4 Pro installs three infrared cameras inside the device as a way to achieve eye tracking and face tracking, supporting accurate measurement and step-less automatic adjustment of the device’s pupil distance and IPD to ensure the best image quality and eye comfort.

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