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TECHNOLOGY
With venture funding from SoftBank and
others, ByteDance Ltd., the maker of
China’s most popular news-aggregation
app and a popular Vine-like video service,
will dethrone Uber Technologies Inc. as the
world’s most valuable startup, according to
people familiar with the matter.
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DAVID HUME KENNERLY/GETTY IMAGES
One of Zhang’s consistent problems has been
government censorship. The algorithm-driven
nature of Jinri Toutiao (think Facebook’s news
feed) gives ByteDance some cover when
censors complain that its filters are too open,
but the government briefly suspended the
news app and Tik Tok in the spring. It also made
ByteDance shutter a nascent joke-sharing app.
ByteDance is in the process of combining
Tik Tok with
Musical.ly,the popular lip-syncing
app it bought for $800 million last year. The
company’s acquisitions have been smart,
expanding its vast reach and raising its ad rates.
But it remains to be seen how much staying
power $3 billion can buy ByteDance in its battle
with Tencent.
—Lulu Chen and Mark Bergen
ByteDance
DealSnapshot
Risks
What’s
next
The money will give six-year-old ByteDance
needed firepower as it tries to expand ad
sales for its news app, Jinri Toutiao (which has
roughly 200 million users), and video service,
Tik Tok (500 million users). The efort to prove
it can turn a profit will intensify the company’s
direct competition with Tencent Holdings Ltd.
Founder Zhang Yiming, 35, is the first to build a
Chinese startup with real scale without taking
money from Tencent or Alibaba Group Holding
Ltd. Jinri Toutiao outdid Tencent’s news portals
by tailoring users’ feeds to match their reading
habits. Tik Tok became such a hit that Tencent’s
WeChat blocked direct access to it.
What it
does
Howit
gothere
three to seven seconds. But that’s already a lot of
time during an earthquake, and the wireless carri-
ers used to relay FEMA’s alerts add 10 more seconds
of delay, whether the message is transmitted via SMS
or an app’s push notiication, according to De Groot.
To speed transmission, ShakeAlert is taking a
kitchen-sink approach. More than two dozen pub-
lic and private groups are involved in pilot programs
up and down the coast, including the Bay Area Rapid
Transit system, a handful of Los Angeles public
schools, Northridge Hospital Medical Center, and
NBCUniversal Media LLC. Where possible, they’re
cutting the wireless carriers out of the equation.
RH2 Engineering Inc. is wiring Paciic Northwest
water tank valves to close when they receive alerts
through the FEMA system. Communications com-
pany Everbridge Inc. is working with the California
Institute of Technology and other schools to send
early warning calls, emails, and app notiications
across their campuses.
Early Warning Labs LLC, the startup that made
QuakeAlert, the app Loor uses, is retroitting L.A.’s
subways and rails so they shut down automatically
when a major temblor is detected. It’s also teamed
with Johnson Controls, a maker of building equip-
ment, to add alert systems to commercial buildings
and begun equipping L.A.-area city halls, libraries,
and condos with seismic warnings, including over PA
systems. Early Warning founder Joshua Bashioum, a
former volunteer FEMA search-and-rescue instruc-
tor, says his eight-person team is working on triggers
to open gates and doors and halt elevators.
The city of Los Angeles has also hired AT&T Inc.
to create an app that uses ShakeAlert data to send
push notiications to all 48,000 city employees. The
goal is to have all of them using that app by the end
of the year. AT&T declined to comment on delays
in relaying the alerts through its network but says
it plans to expand the app into more cities. A ifth-
generation wireless network might be able to solve
the problem of carrier delays, but reliable 5G stan-
dards and service remain a ways of.
For now, the West Coast is relying on what it’s
got. All of California will have some form of messag-
ing coverage by the time ShakeAlert is publicly avail-
able, De Groot says. In the near term, the assembled
pilot programs should be able to reduce by more
than half the lag added by wireless push notiica-
tions. So far, “nothing’s fast enough” to eiciently
warn an entire city at this point, De Groot says. “By
the time you get an alert, you could be in the earth-
quake already.”
—Adam Popescu
FUNDER
SoftBank
Group Corp.
is said to be planning an investment of at
least $1.5b as part of a $3b funding round
EXPECTED
VALUATION
$75b
THE BOTTOM LINE ShakeAlert seems well-equipped to
detect the next Northridge-size earthquake before it hits. The
communications technology it’s relying on, less so.