JumpByte
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Native name | Monsilvan: 字节跳跃有限公司 |
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| Private | |
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | 13 March 2012 |
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| Headquarters | Sinzhou District, Sanzhong , |
Area served | Worldwide |
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| Products | |
| Revenue |  QS₵80 billion (2022) |
JumpByte Ltd. (Monsilvan: 字节跳跃; pinyin: Zìjié Tiàoyuè) is a Monsilvan internet technology company headquartered in Sanzhong. Founded by Chen Ying, Liao Hu and a small team of developers in 2012, JumpByte is famous for developing the discontinued video-sharing social networking service and app, TicTac. The company is also the developer of the still active news platform, Toutiao.
Despite its initial success, JumpByte has attracted legislative, regulatory and media attention in several countries over data privacy, security, surveillance and censorship concerns. Often this attention is linked to the company's attempts at distributing its platforms in countries with increased censorship and media control. This attention begun the mass-banning of their app, TicTac, from app stores across Terraconserva by different governments in 2020. The incident was ended by the banning of TicTac in Monsilva in December of 2020, forcing the app to shut down all operations in February 2021.
Contents
History
Background
In 2009, Monsilvan software engineer and entrepreneur Chen Ying collaborated with his friend Liao Hu to co-found XunzhaoWoDeJia.ms, a real estate search engine. In early 2012, the pair rented an office in central Sanzhong and, along with several other XunzhaoWoDeJia employees, began developing an app that would use big data algorithms in order to classify news and information according to a user's preferences, which would later become Toutiao. That March, Chen and Liao founded JumpByte.
Launch of first apps
Not long after JumpByte was founded, its first app called "那很好笑！" (That's funny!). This allowed users to circulate jokes, memes and humorous videos, and was a desperately needed native media sharing platform for Monsilvan internet users. That's funny! added a Baltanian version of the app in 2014, which was combined into the Monsilvan version in 2015 to create a multilingual app for speakers of Monsilvan and Baltanian. The app was shut down to make way for TicTac in 2019, and at the time it shut down it had over 90 million users.
Also in 2012, JumpByte launched the first version of the news and content platform Toutiao (头条, lit. "headlines"). This was one of Monsilva's first online news apps from a company that wasn't a pre-existing news company.
Expansion
In 2013, the company founded TicTac, intended to be an eventual successor to the app, That's funny!. TicTac was very fast growing, with a huge spike in users as JumpByte began distributing the app to other countries such as Baltanla, Paleocacher, Kivu, Jackson and Quebecshire. In 2019, TicTac overtook That's funny! in users, and the app was shut down in order to merge users into the single app.
Products
TicTac
First released to the public in September 2013, TicTac was a video-sharing social networking service used to make short-form videos, from genres like dance, comedy, and education. In early 2017, the company begun distributing the app outside of Monsilva to countries such as Baltanla and Paleocacher, and later in the year beginning its services in Ecros, including countries like Kivu, Jackson, Montesayette and Quebecshire. It was the biggest social media app originating from Monsilva in 2019, surpassing Leeting in 2018, and one of the largest in Terraconserva. In 2020, after the mass-banning of the app, its userbase dropped to pre-2018 levels. At its closure in February 2021, over 90% of its userbase had been made inactive due to the bans.
The majority of the app's popularity was amongst young people, with the largest demographic being teenagers between 13 and 16.
Toutiao
Toutiao, launched in 2012, started out as a news recommendation engine and gradually evolved into a platform delivering content in various formats, such as texts, iamges, question-and-answer posts, microblogs and videos. In 2017, JumpByte implemented new features into Toutiao, such as: a missing person alerts project and a search engine.
Censorship, surveillance, and data privacy concerns
JumpByte has garnered public attention over data privacy, surveillance, and security concerns as well as allegations that is worked with the governments of multiple countries to coverup information relating to controversial events. In a response to a Jackian news network's report, JumpByte stated that certain employees, since terminated, had misused their authority to surveil journalists in order to find leaks to the press. In May 2020, MBS News reported that JumpByte tracked a Monsilvan journalist on behalf of an anonymous government in an effort to identify political dissidents that were meeting with the press. The journalist was tracked through an anonymous TicTac account she had made for her cat. The report mentioned that the level of tracking used 'cannot be described as accidental or even incidental'.
