Following is a transcript of the video.

Abby Tang: It's a prank, right? Hoverboards are pranks?

Jason Sanchez: It's a lie. It's not, like, it's not a hoverboard.

Jacqui Frank: They're just ugly skateboards. Like, just call a spade a spade. It doesn't make any sense to me.

Jade Tungul: Hoverboards. Jesus Christ.

Sanchez: "Back to the Future II" introduced this concept of the hoverboard. I've been dreaming of a hoverboard since I watched that movie, and that was 1989. Kind of flash forward to a couple years ago, and it's not a hoverboard. It's, like, a thing with a wheel. One thing has, like, a single wheel I see people on, they're like, "Oh, a hoverboard." I'm like, "You're not hovering." It's a wheel; it touches the ground. There's no hover.

Frank: I have, like, a huge, massive problem with them to start, just, like, at the very beginning, which is that they are called something that they do not do. They do not hover, so what the heck?

Tungul: They were on Vine a lot, actually. People used them a lot on Vine. Tang: Terrible start for a hoverboard, right? If you're starting a hoverboard with wheels, you have gone in the wrong direction.

Sanchez: You know, the only real hoverboard I've seen was, like, this Lexus ad stunt that was done in a skate park outside of Barcelona. You needed, like, tons of liquid nitrogen to fuel the thing to get it to levitate.

Frank: There was, like, the fake Lexus hoverboard. Essentially what makes that fake is that it only works on this, like, specific metal ground that Lexus created, and that was cooler. If it were real and, like, you could use it everywhere, that would be a whole thing. I'd pay a billion dollars, and I'd have one today! It's like, "Oh, what happened to Jackie?" "Uh, I think she's homeless. She got a really sick hoverboard, though." Like, that would be my whole life, OK?

Tungul: I remember when they were getting really big, there were multiple stories that came out about hoverboards, like, blowing up. It just became a safety concern, and that was a whole nother thing.

Tang: Oh, my God, I forgot, hoverboards exploded! I legitimately forgot that they exploded. I'm just mad at the mere concept of them. I forgot the actual dangerous, detrimental things that they did.

Tungul: Kind of a fail. Sadly.

Shannon Murphy: I don't think foldable screens are worth it. I think, in the long run, they're gonna cause problems and they're gonna make phones last for a shorter amount of time.

Antonio Villas-Boas: Different companies have different reasons why they're making foldable screens. The primary reason that we're hearing a lot right now is to turn your phone into a tablet when you want it to, you know?

Frank: What I don't understand about foldable screens: What is the actual, like, necessary aspect of them? They make the screen bigger, OK, but, like, we have iPads and we have tablets. Like, big screens are something we already have, so I don't know why we need that. That's one.

Tang: Why? Why do you?

Villas-Boas: It's really for sort of "power users," per se. The extra screen real estate lets you run three apps at the same time, for example.

Frank: The Samsung one they recalled. It's, like, soft and, like, clearly soft in, like, weird places. I'm not willing to sacrifice general durability, and I wouldn't even consider the phones we do use that durable, like, for it so that it can be slightly bigger for, again, an unknown reason! Did I ask for that? Like, who were they giving that to? Who needs it?

Tang: I understand that it is objectively cool technology. Like, rolling up a screen or whatever.

Villas-Boas: It's the most fragile thing in the world. You can barely look at it without even trying to, like, you know, potentially damaging it. It lets in a lot of dust. Like, there's a lot of gaps everywhere.

Murphy: I do feel like they bring back a nostalgia almost of, like, flip phones.

Villas-Boas: I think companies are under a lot of pressure to be the first at something.

Tang: People are like, oh, it's convenient, 'cause it's smaller. It's not smaller. It isn't. It's the same size, but in half!

Lydia Ramsey: Theranos was the brainchild of a woman called Elizabeth Holmes. She started this company when she was 19, shortly after dropping out from Stanford.

Starr Chen: Their premise was that with one drop of blood, they were gonna be able to run all of these different diagnostic tests. Like, kind of just do a lot of blood work with just a single drop of blood.

Nich Carlson: It was fake; the whole thing was fake. The tool didn't work. You know, they didn't ever get close to having a tool that was, like, testing a drop of blood in a, you know, in a little thing. They actually ended up having a microwave-sized box that also didn't work, and, in fact, what they were doing was getting people's blood and then sending it off to regular blood-testing laboratories, and then sending it back and pretending it was the little box that was doing it.

Ramsey: And she got massive amounts of funding to pull it off, and it was this Silicon Valley darling. She was on the cover of magazines; she was really putting her name out there. She had, like, the iconic black turtleneck, Steve Jobs-esque look. That was a lot of fun.

Chen: Elizabeth Holmes was kind of one of the first big female tech founders to really make it big, and for her whole story to be a sham, it was, like, very disappointing for a lot of folks who were really rooting for her.

Ramsey: This was a lot of powerful people, like the DeVos family, the Walmart family, big names were invested in this company.

Chen: I think Theranos really exposed how little investors sometimes have before they give money to a company.

Carlson: I also think that Theranos is very emblematic of the past decade or so in the United States and in the tech industry. People can throw money at things and hope it's gonna be the next, you know, Apple or Facebook or Google or something like that. And so what you see is you see capital flowing into things that are not necessarily good ideas but are just being presented as brilliant ideas.

Chen: It is really disappointing, I think, because just as far as, like, the actual thing that they were trying to sell would've been really cool.

Ramsey: The fact that it got to be as big of a thing as it was without anybody questioning it, and then for it fail just so spectacularly, I think would definitely qualify it for one of the worst tech products of the decade. Matt Stuart: Snapchat Spectacles are the worst! Oh, they're terrible!

Paige DiFiore: Snapchat Spectacles I think are so dumb.

Danielle Cohen: I don't think you need a pair of sunglasses to record something.

Chris Snyder: I woke up, like, really early to get them in line when they were doing the pop-up shops.

DiFiore: Do any of us know what Snapchat Spectacles are? So, I'm convinced that they only made, like, 15 of them, gave them to, like, the biggest YouTubers in the world, convinced us all that we needed them, but never really explained what they are and, like, never actually produced them, 'cause I've never met anyone in my life who owns them.

Will Wei: So, these are Snapchat Spectacles. Right, as you can see right here. So it's like, there's a button here, you press it, a little light goes, but the camera's here, I think. So it records, like, this circular video, then it goes straight into your Snapchat archive, video, whatever, that you can then upload to your story.

Stuart: It took a snap, and that's all they did. So you knew exactly what you were getting. If you're gonna buy expensive sunglasses like that, you want them to last a while, and eventually the battery on those is gonna degrade over time, so you'll just have to get a whole new pair.

Cohen: My dad got given several free ones at his office. They came with very, very little instructions. I do have a few other videos from my Spectacles because I didn't know I was recording, and I would often take videos of myself putting away the glasses and closing the case.

Snyder: I knew this was trendy, and everyone was talking about them, and they were only offered in limited quantities at first, so if you had them, you know, it was kind of cool to walk around wearing Spectacles and be like, well, I got them first, you know. But I don't think I ever actually did that. I don't think I ever actually walked around wearing them.

Wei: The only issue was that, yeah, it's circular video, right? Like, it can only live on Snapchat basically. No other platforms really adopted that.

Cohen: Most of the technology we've tried to put in glasses has not really hit off. People aren't really interested in it. This was such an embarrassing flop for Snapchat. I feel like they just tried to make one product, and no one liked it.

Stuart: I have a butterfly keyboard. I hate it. Butterfly keyboard was Apple pushing for, "Everything has to be thinner," "Everything has to be lighter," and so they made this keyboard where the keys barely go in.

Villas-Boas: Tiny specks of dust, even maybe apparently just one or two specks could get underneath a key and cause it to malfunction.

Stuart: I have one on my laptop right now, and it's constantly creating double spaces for me and weird period effects, and it just makes me look like I'm a terrible typer, because it screws up all of these things that I do.

Villas-Boas: I actually wrote a post about the butterfly keyboard. I wrote several, but one of them was written with my butterfly keyboard on my 2016 MacBook Pro. I was affected by the issue, and I wrote the post without correcting any of the typos. The issue for me, specifically, was that my G key was not working. So try, as a tech reporter, writing Google without a G key. It sucks. It's been somewhat resolved. Apple's replacing keyboards for free. The replacement keyboards are the same butterfly keyboards, so this might be happening over and over again.

Stuart: Apple decided to sacrifice functionality for thinness, and then it became this whole scandal because an entire line of laptops were unusable because of this dumb keyboard.

Villas-Boas: The Apple butterfly keyboard is certainly one of the worst pieces of tech of the decade, certainly in recent memory. An unreliable keyboard is a bad piece of tech.

Stuart: Google Glass was this weird thing they did in the middle of the decade or so that was supposed to put, like, kind of augmented reality of Google stuff in front of your face, on glasses.

Carlson: It was supposed to be that you could, like, look out and see a heads-up display, but actually, it was a little tiny monitor. You had to, like, look like this to see, and it was, like, useless information, and it was really terrible.

Wei: It wasn't ready for prime time. It was bulky. If you wore it outside, you looked pretty weird.

Carlson: It was, like, a junk gadget that people thought would revolutionize, like, personal computing before it came out, and then the second it came out, everyone was like, "This is really terrible."

Stuart: For, like, six months, everybody wanted Google Glass, and then everybody realized it was terrible. So nobody wanted Google Glass anymore.

Carlson: The biggest and worst problem with Google Glass is that you look like a moron when you wear it. And so, no one's ever gonna wanna wear it, and, by the way, the functionality didn't at all make up for the fact that you look like a moron. Wei: I think there was a phrase going around called, like, "Glassholes," where a bunch of people in Silicon Valley, they had versions of Google Glass, they wore it out in public, some people got punched in the face for wearing it. Silicon Valley is a weird place.

Stuart: Google loves building hype for their products and then not living up to it. They have a whole graveyard of discontinued products. So I think they were trying to build hype for this product they were doing, and then what they actually created did not live up to the hype that they built for it.

Nikki Torres: Bluetooth has always sucked.

Taryn Varricchio: I don't like Bluetooth.

Victoria Barranco: Not a Bluetooth fan.

Alyse Kalish: A lot of times, it'll be like, my headphones will attach to the wrong device 'cause, like, I'll automatically have Bluetooth on, like, my laptop and my phone, so then accidentally, like, connect to the wrong thing and then I'll be playing music, like, out loud, which is unfortunate.

Varricchio: Bluetooth made me run a red light, and it kind of scarred me. So, like, Bluetooth is an absolute no.

Torres: Bluetooth has always been horrible. Actually, I'm kind of having nightmares in my head. Bluetooth is kind of the bane of my existence. So many missed calls, so many things that never came through.

Barranco: And then battery-life problems, plus there's the, like, ecological issue of basically all Bluetooth headphones are gonna end up in a landfill. So, not really pro-that.

Kalish: It's definitely not intuitive as someone who's not super techy. It's kind of confusing where I'm like, "Oh, gosh, how do I...?" The only solution I have is to just turn it off, but there's got to be an easier way to, like, pair things.

Varricchio: So, I do like Bluetooth headphones. OK, no, actually as much as I like it for my headphones, I run into several issues where the connection just doesn't work or it's not recognizing my device and it's like, that's literally your one purpose as Bluetooth, to recognize my device. I don't know, I don't know why it's not better. I don't know if it's, like, my internet connection or if it's me, but, like, heard this from several accounts that Bluetooth just kind of sucks.

Barranco: Virtual reality is the use of technology, like a headset, to put a person into another reality, a digital world by putting, like, a screen in front of their face.

Carlson: I was really, really excited about VR because, I mean, I tried it once and it was so cool.

Michelle Yan: I feel like it's a battle. Like, there are some people that are like, VR is so awesome right now and, like, why are you hating on it, and there are other people who are like, VR isn't meeting the expectation that people had.

Tang: I want VR to be better so bad! I want to be able to use it with all of my favorite games. Like, I just want to put it on and be in Fallout, or like put it on and be Red Dead Redempting.

Carlson: I think I wanted to use VR for something that crossed gaming, art, narrative, that was, like, the next great invention in storytelling. I thought it would be something like the movie. It is not that, which is really disappointing. Hopefully it will be. It was supposed to be. It is not.

Yan: I think also VR is trying to be half-gaming-systems/half-, like, 3D-experience. VR, nobody really knows what it wants to be in the future, in a sense.

Tang: I feel like we were promised something so much better, and now as more companies roll out their own VR sets, they just keep getting more convoluted.

Yan: VR headsets are platform-specific, you know? And that's a problem, because you don't have that flexibility. You have to really stick with the same ecosystem, and it's limited.

Tang: It's the worst compared to its own expectations.

Carlson: I think the biggest disappointment for VR is, yes, it's expensive, and it's prohibitively expensive for many people. Yes, it requires too much space, and those are very disappointing things, but actually, if you go further and get it, it's not gonna feel worth it, because I don't think you get the fully immersive experience that you really were expecting when you first tried it for the first time.

Tang: Phones shouldn't explode.

Villas-Boas: So, the Galaxy Note 7 is well known because it was exploding.

Stuart: You just don't want things exploding around you. It's good life advice.

Villas-Boas: Specifically, the battery would explode; it was poorly designed. The enclosure for it was poorly designed. The battery was not reliable, and it would catch fire for certain people.

Stuart: It was, eventually, I think, banned from airplanes. Like, if you got a Note 7, you couldn't fly with it, because they were worried that the battery would explode. Exploding batteries are a deal breaker when it comes to a phone. You don't want that. No, uh-uh.

Villas-Boas: To be fair, the Note 7 debacle, it was a relative small amount of users that had issues. But the danger was so high that it was worth a recall.

Tang: It just, phones should explode! I am confident that I am in the right about this.

Frank: Surely there's some kind of legal problem with calling it a hoverboard when it doesn't hover! It just makes no sense to me! It's like if I started calling, like, my gloves shoes. They're obviously not shoes! They don't serve the purpose of shoes! It makes no sense! So that's how I feel about hoverboards.

A new weapon being tested by the US military could give special operators a more lethal edge by allowing them to shoot underwater, according to Defense One.

The bullets, manufactured by DSG Technologies, are tipped with tungsten and create an gas bubble to allow the bullet to move rapidly through the water. Ordinary bullets don't have this supercavitating effect, which means they move much more slowly through water. 

While ordinary bullets can travel about half a mile per minute, that speed quickly slows to a complete stop when the bullet travels through denser materials like water. 

According to DSG Technologies, "Depending on the weapon and the used loading variant, this ammunition is suitable for use in partial or fully submerged weapons, regardless of if the target is in water or on the surface."

A press officer with US Special Operations Command told Insider that the bullets were being tested by the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO). CTTSO confirmed to Insider that it is testing supercavitating ammunition, but declined to answer questions about whether Special Forces communities have been involved in the testing, or whether DSG Technologies is the company that provides the ammunition for testing.

DSG told Defense News that its ammunition is undergoing several tests with the military, including tests in which the bullets are fired from underwater up to the surface. 

Odd Leonhardsen, DSG's chief science officer, also told Defense One that DSG is selling the bullets to governments around the world, but did not specify where — although he did mention that those countries were testing the bullets by firing them from a helicopter into water. 

According to Defense One, .50 caliber CAV-X bullets can travel 60 meters underwater, and can go through 2 centimeters of steel fired from 17 meters away, indicating that it could be used to penetrate submarines. 

How the bullets actually create the gas bubble is unclear, Popular Mechanics reports, but they could somehow harness the gasses created from the gunpowder when the bullet is fired. Popular Mechanics also reports that the bullets are being developed to be compatible with existing weapons, indicating that bullets can be used in and out of the water.

China's unprecedented oppression of Uighur Muslims goes beyond the borders of Xinjiang, the western Chinese region where most of the ethnic minority live, former residents told Business Insider.

Under President Xi Jinping, China is waging a widespread counterterrorism campaign on Xinjiang, also known to Uighurs as East Turkestan. It is a paranoid move in response to a spate of ethnic riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in the country, ten years ago.

The Communist Party sees Uighurs' religion — Islam — as a threat, and often conflates it with religious extremism.

For this reason, China apparently feels the need to control the Uighur diaspora outside the country in case they return home and carry out attacks.

Leaked classified documents, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists last month, showed a concerted effort by regional officials to keep a close eye on Uighurs with foreign citizenship, wherever they are.

"For those still outside the country for whom suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out, the border control reading will be carried out by hand to ensure that they are arrested the moment they cross the border," one government bulletin said.

"For those ... whom suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out, they should first be placed into concentrated education and training for examination," it added, referring to tightly-secured detention camps in the region, where former inmates say they are physically and psychologically tortured.

'Family and friends suffer the consequences'

Several members of the Uighur diaspora told Business Insider they've also been spooked by China without even having to step foot in the country.

Rushan Abbas, a Uighur activist living in Herndon, Virginia, discovered last September that her sister had been disappeared by Xinjiang authorities six days after she spoke out against China's human rights record. She still has no idea of her whereabouts.

"The Chinese government is basically holding her hostage for my speaking out about the horrific blatant human rights abuses of the Chinese government," Abbas told Business Insider last month.

"My sister's story is not unique. China harasses Uighurs in the diaspora's relatives back home, presenting them with heartbreaking choice: Keep silent about the horrific violations of human rights, or let your family and friends suffer the consequences for your choice for speaking out," she said.

"I am an example of that."

An entire business gone

Abbas is not the only foreign Uighur who has been punished in Xinjiang for their actions outside the region.

Bahram Sintash, a Uighur-American living in Chantilly, Virginia, has been campaigning for his father's release from the Xinjiang camps since October 2018. He has called on the Chinese government to reveal the whereabouts of his father, a retired magazine editor, through social media, protests, and speaking to journalists.

Sintash has been living in the US since 2008, but continued to visit his family in Xinjiang until 2015, when his Chinese visa was inexplicably revoked. That same year, he had opened a company in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital city, to provide fitness supplements and workout plans to Uighurs in the region.

Sintash requested anonymity for his company to protect its former employees. But he said the business flourished, and had earned close to a million dollars.

That success came to an end in October 2018 — exactly two days after Sintash spoke to Radio Free Asia about his father's disappearance for the first time.

Multiple police officers went to the company's office in Urumqi, took photos of every corner of the office, and told employees to leave as soon as possible, Sintash told Business Insider.

Shortly after the raid, police officers further questioned his colleagues, shut down his office, storage warehouse, and corporate social media accounts, he said.

"The police warned my partners to stop communicating with me and told them I was the enemy of the country living overseas," Sintash said.

"I couldn't get my money back from the region," he added. "I can no longer contact any business partners or my teammates or my customers."

Sintash said he learned the news of his company's collapse not from any official correspondence from Xinjiang authorities, but from one of his customers.

There's no other way to verify it: His mother blocked him on WeChat last year for fear of getting in trouble with authorities, and all his phone calls to regional authorities about his father have gone unanswered.

Mysterious automated calls and Facebook messages

As some Uighurs lose touch with their family on the phone, others have received menacing messages from Chinese-speaking agents.

Guly Mahsut, a Uighur Canadian living in Ottawa, reported receiving multiple automated calls from Mandarin Chinese-speaking agents in recent weeks.

A female caller had identified herself as the Chinese embassy and told her to pick up some documents. Mahsut told Business Insider that even as she kept blocking the numbers calling her, she kept receiving the same automated calls from other numbers.

It's not clear how the caller got Mahsut's phone number, what documents she is referring to, and why Mahsut was receiving these calls. Earlier this year she publicly questioned China's claim that it had released most inmates from Xinjiang's detention centers, telling Agence France-Presse she knew of a cousin and two friends still in the camps.

Listen to one of the recordings Mahsut received below, accompanied with a rough translation of the message verified by Business Insider:

The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa told Business Insider this call was a "telecommunications fraud," calling the caller "law breakers [who] use technical means to disguise phone numbers as embassies and consulates." It added that the alleged scam is "not targeted at a specific group of people."

Some 30 members of the Uighur diaspora in Norway have received dozens of automated calls from phone numbers connected to the Chinese embassy in Oslo, Al Jazeera reported last month.

One of the Uighurs, a naturalized Norwegian citizen, said she started receiving the calls after attending an anti-China rally on October 1.

The Chinese embassy in Oslo denied the calls in a similar manner to the London embassy, saying they were part of a scam.

Uighurs living in the US and France also told The Daily Beast and Foreign Policy last year that they had been asked for personal information including license plate numbers, bank details, ID photos, and marriage certificates — and threatened harm to their families in Xinjiang if they did not comply.

Sintash, the fitness company owner, has also received messages in Chinese threatening to harm his family.

In January 2019, he received a comment in simplified Chinese on Facebook, in response to a comment he had left in the Uighur language on another person's page.

"You are a good son of the Chinese Communist Party. Your father has been released now," the comment read, without providing any evidence.

"I reckon you can keep selling your white powder [crying-eyes emoji]," the comment continued, in what Sintash took to mean his fitness supplements. "Strongly support you."

The account was registered under a Chinese name, and its profile photo was of a young Chinese woman.

The entire account has since been deleted. Business Insider last saw the post in February, and has preserved screenshots of the comment.

"What I understood [from the comment] was: 'Keep obeying the Chinese Communist Party and shut your mouth. Your father is in our hands,'" Sintash told Business Insider.

"I felt threatened by the CCP."

Trolling people is not a new Chinese tactic. The country's propaganda department pays some two million people to publish pro-government posts and attack critics on social media, a Harvard University report found in 2016.

These commenters are known as the "wumao dang," which translates to "50 cent party" in Chinese — a reference to the amount of money in yuan they are allegedly paid per post. That's about $0.07.

'Your mother has died'

Another bizarre run-in with Chinese speakers took place in late October, when Sintash and other Uighur activists staged a protest outside the Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, DC.

As Sintash and 13 others held up signs and chanted slogans, a Han Chinese man — the largest ethnic group — went up to them and said: "Your mother has died" five times.

Video shows the group looking at the man, puzzled, as he walked away.

"He was a pro-CCP Chinese citizen who could've said anything to define [himself] ... but he chose to tell us 'your mother has died,'" Sintash said.

"I was shocked at the time. I never expected someone to deliver such an evil message while in the United States."

Those words were particularly jarring to Sintash, who hadn't spoken to his mother or anyone else in his family since February 2018. To this day, he still has no idea who that man was.

Will these threats stop Uighurs from speaking out for their families trapped in China? Probably not.

"They cannot control us," Sintash said. "China looks for people who are weaker mentally. I am different ... I have the US behind me."

"I never cared about politics in the past," he added. "What China is doing to the people in the region — we have to speak up. We have to stand up."

Former Rep. Katie Hill wrote in a New York Times op-ed that she struggled with suicidal ideation in the aftermath of an alleged "revenge porn" incident. 

Hill was elected in November 2018 to serve as the US representative for California's 25th Congressional district. She announced her intent to resign from Congress roughly one year later, after news broke that she had been in a relationship with a campaign aide.

Nude photos of Hill were also published by two media outlets without her consent. Hill said she believes her estranged husband Kenny Heslep was behind the leak, although she notes that he has said he was hacked. Hill and Heslep are divorcing.

"Many people have nightmares in which they're naked in public, trapped and trying to escape," Hill wrote. "In the days leading up to my resignation, my life was just like everyone's worst nightmare."

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Gen. David Berger, the US Marine Corps commandant, suggested the concerns surrounding a service members' use of questionable Chinese-owned apps like TikTok should be directed against the military's leadership, rather than the individual troops.

Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday morning, Berger said the younger generation of troops had a "clearer view" of the technology "than most people give them credit for."

"That said, I'd give us a 'C-minus' or a 'D' in educating the force on the threat of even technology," Berger said. "Because they view it as two pieces of gear, 'I don't see what the big deal is.'"

"That's not their fault. That's on us," Berger added. "Once they begin to understand the risks, what the impact to them is tactically … then it becomes clear. I don't blame them for that. This is a training and education that we have to do."

Foreign-owned apps like TikTok have prompted concern from lawmakers and the military in recent months. TikTok, the viral video-sharing app from China, was investigated by intelligence agencies and the military for concerns on the "operational security risks posed ... and other China-owned social media platforms that can access massive amounts of US users' personal data," according to a letter by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in November.

"National security experts have raised concerns about TikTok's collection and handling of user data, including user content and communications, IP addresses, location-related data, metadata, and other sensitive personal information," Schumer added in the letter.

To "err on the side of caution," US Army cadets throughout high school and university were banned from using TikTok while in uniform to represent the military, a spokeswoman said in November. The act does not ban them from using it for personal use.

The app, which was formerly Musical.ly, exploded in popularity and boasted 1 billion monthly active users earlier this year. TikTok and its owner, Beijing ByteDance Technology, claims that American user data is not stored in China, nor is it politically influenced by the country.

"Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China," the company said in a statement in October. "We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked. Period."

Bath & Body Works shoppers took to the web to shine a light on the chain's annual Candle Day sale.

The bath and beauty chain's website said that the sale featured $9.50 three-wick candles. That deal has since run out online. Many stores around the country opened as early as 6 or 7 a.m. for the sale, causing some fans to burn the candle at both ends in order to get first dibs on the merchandise.

So far, posts about Bath & Body Works' candle sale have run the gamut, featuring everything from glowing excitement over new purchases to fiery criticism of issues with the chain's website. Bath & Body Works' parent company L Brands didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Some posters took the time to show off their new candles.

Others expressed disappointment that the price of the candles has ticked up this year.

Others went after Bath & Body Works' website bell, book, and candle, citing crashes and issues with overcharging.

Online observers also debated the validity of making the choice to travel to a Bath & Body Works before dawn to buy candles.

And some commenters took the time to remind shoppers to be kind to Bath & Body Works employees amidst the holiday rush.

Quin Garcia is a self-described "car guy."

He also really believes autonomous and electric vehicles will revolutionize the transportation industry and the broader society.

But if you scrutinize the portfolio of Autotech Ventures, the transportation-focused venture-capital firm that Garcia cofounded, you won't find any investments in companies developing or building cars for the masses — autonomous, electric, or otherwise. That's intentional, Garcia told Business Insider in a recent interview.

"Our job is to make money, and if we don't, we're out of business. So that's the ultimate lens through which we look when making investment decisions," Garcia said. "And when you are a financially motivated investor, you also have to think about time horizon" for a payoff, he added.

As transformational as electric and self-driving cars will eventually be, companies building them require huge investments, Garcia said. Tesla aside, it could be many years — maybe even decades — before investors in those kinds of companies see much of a return.

"As much as I want EVs here yesterday and for everyone to have one ... it's going to take time," he said.

Autonomous-vehicle startups face 'a day of reckoning'

Likewise, he said, fully autonomous vehicles that can drive anywhere and everywhere are likely more than 10 years out.

"We're just too early to be investing in something that's more than 10 years away, so we stayed away," Garcia said.

Indeed, in the autonomous area, he thinks a shakeout is coming among the numerous startups that are working on self-driving cars. The technological and regulatory obstacles to the rollout of such vehicles remain huge, even after years of investment, he said. And he said some companies were likely going to run low on cash in the next year or so — long before there's a widespread market for autonomous vehicles.

"We think that there's a day of reckoning coming for a lot of these ... autonomous startups," he said.

But Garcia thinks there are still ways to benefit in the much nearer term, from both the development of autonomous-vehicle technology and the still nascent, but growing, market for electric cars. Autotech has placed bets in both areas, even if it's not investing in mainstream car companies, per se.

In the electric-car area, the firm has backed Volta, a startup that has rolled out a network of more than 1,000 charging stations around the country. Unlike other such companies, Volta doesn't charge customers to juice up their cars. Instead, it makes its money on advertising. Its charging stations are designed to look like kiosks or digital billboards that carry ads, and it tries to place them in prominent areas, such as near the front of retail stores. As such, the company isn't dependent on the number of people who have electric cars, but on the much larger number of people who can see its ads.

"In Volta's case, they're selling eyeballs instead of electrons," he said.

Mines will adopt self-driving vehicles much faster than consumers 

Similarly, in the autonomous area, the company is backing SafeAI, which is developing self-driving technologies for mining and construction vehicles, and Verdant Robotics, which is working on similar technologies for farm vehicles. Such vehicles generally won't be operated on public roads and instead will typically be operated on privately owned land, Garcia said. So they won't have to worry about the complexities of navigating city streets or highways and the challenges of contending with human drivers, complicated street signs, and sometimes unpredictable pedestrians or bicyclists.

Because of that, such vehicles will likely face much less government regulation — and a significant market for them could develop much sooner than for fully self-driving cars for consumers.

"The time to market and the time to revenue is much shorter," Garcia said.

And Garcia sees plenty of opportunities in the transportation sector outside electric vehicles and self-driving-car technologies. Three other big trends are shaping the transportation-industry writ large, he said — the connecting of vehicles to the internet, vehicle sharing, and the adoption of enterprise software by transportation-related companies. Autotech was a backer of Lyft — Garcia and John Zimmer, the app-based taxi company's cofounder, were fraternity brothers in college. But many of its investments have been less high profile.

The firm focuses on finding and betting on early-stage companies in the transportation sector, often investing in the seed or Series A round. Autotech's limited partners include some of the major auto-industry suppliers, including Murata Manufacturing and Denso. Garcia and his team also have other, long-standing connections in the transportation industry. Autotech's forte is helping connect those contacts to the transportation-related startups it backs, he said.

Among the other firms in which it has invested outside the autonomous- and electric-vehicle areas is Fixico, a European startup that's created a marketplace for car-repair and body-shop services. Instead of having to go from body shop to body shop to get quotes for a minor repair, customers can submit a picture and description through Fixico's website and request quotes for fixing it.

"Is that going to have as an enormous an impact on our society as autonomous? Nope," Garcia said. "But there's still a huge pain there, and the opportunity is more near term to solve that pain.

"It's not going take 10 years to solve the challenge of getting gouged by a mechanic."

Got a tip about venture capital or startups? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home are some of the hottest tech products this holiday season. 

The compact gadgets have no keyboards or mice, and usually no screens. Just talk to one of the devices and it responds, serving up news, recipes and other info, playing your favorite music and even controlling the lights and thermostat in your house. 

But Smart speakers are just the most visible manifestation of a broader shift happening in tech: the rise of voice computing. 

Thanks to advances in speech recognition, artificial intelligence and processing power, it's now possible to step away from the screens of PCs and phones, and tap into the internet simply by speaking. The virtual assistants that make this possible, like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant, can live inside all sorts of products beyond smart speakers — from wristwatches to microwave ovens and eyeglasses. 

The age of voice computing promises to open up exciting new opportunities that once seemed possible only in science-fiction movies (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has even credited "Star Trek" as the inspiration for the Echo device). But it also brings new challenges and implications for privacy, security as well as accessibility and diversity.

Who are the startups leading the voice revolution? What are the different ways businesses can adapt to the emerging voice platform? And what are risks to prepare for?

In this special report on Business Insider Prime, we take a close look the tech industry's next big platform shift: voice.

2 Amazon execs discuss plans to make a smarter Alexa that can anticipate your needs and stay ahead of Google in the voice wars

Hackers are inventing clever ways to trick the microphones in smart speakers, and it's opening a 'new world of dangers'

Digital transformation has arrived.

Not a single industry is safe from the unstoppable wave of digitization that is sweeping through finance, retail, transportation, and more.

And in 2019, there will be even more transformative developments that will change our businesses, careers, and lives.

Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has put together a list of 40 Big Tech Predictions for 2019 across Apps and Platforms, Digital Media, Payments, The Internet of Things, E-Commerce, Fintech, Transportation & Logistics, and Digital Health.

This exclusive report can be yours for FREE today.

Disney Plus' "The Mandalorian" continues to dominate streaming television, thanks in no small part to the popularity of Baby Yoda.

Every week, Parrot Analytics provides Business Insider with a list of the nine most in-demand TV shows on streaming services in the US. The data is based on "demand expressions," Parrot Analytics' globally standardized TV demand measurement unit. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement, and viewership weighted by importance, so a stream or download is a higher expression of demand than a "like" or comment on social media, for instance.

New to this week's list is Netflix's animated fantasy series "The Dragon Prince," which recently debuted its third season.

Below are this week's nine most popular original shows on Netflix and other streaming services:

Apple is at a tipping point.

The tech giant’s fiscal Q1 2019 represented the first time in more than a decade the company saw declines in both revenue and profit during a holiday season.

Apple’s peripheral segments — 'Services' and 'Wearables, Home, and Accessories' — were two bright spots for the company.

And Apple’s latest event marked a shift in the company’s approach, with a focus on news, games, videos, and other content.

Business Insider Intelligence has outlined the road ahead for the tech giant in The Future of Apple.

This exclusive report can be yours for FREE today.

Apple may be responsible for popularizing the truly wireless earbud trend with its AirPods, which have become so popular they've inspired memes and helped make the company's wearables business as big as a Fortune 200 company.

But since the original AirPods debuted in 2016, dozens of platform-agnostic alternatives have entered the market — many of which are less expensive than the iPhone maker's cord-free earbuds. 

Anker's Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro earbuds, which launched in September, are one such example. Originally priced at $150 and currently selling for $110, they're cheaper than the $160 AirPods and noticeably less expensive than $250 AirPods Pro. Yet they still offer long battery life, a customizable and comfortable fit, and good sound quality.

Although they lack some of Apple's more useful features, I found that I didn't miss my AirPods much at all when making the switch. 

Here's a closer look at what it's been like to use them. 

Uber has released a list of 15 countries that US tourists took the most international trips to, with neighboring Mexico topping the list.

The ride-hailing company used its own rider data to compile the list in its "A look back at 2019" report. The list includes six European countries, including the Netherlands and France.

The company also found that the Saturday of St. Patrick's Day saw the most Uber rides in the US. This is the second year the Irish holiday claimed such a title, although Halloween celebrations on October 26 and November 2 were close contenders, according to Uber

Keep scrolling to see the other countries on Uber's roundup:

The past decade has transformed modern retail as we know it. 

Advances in technology have drastically changed the way consumers shop, both in-store and online. The last decade ushered in the rise of the direct-to-consumer brand and companies built nearly entirely on social media. Offline, stores began experimenting with new forms of tech to lure shoppers back into brick-and-mortar spaces as foot traffic declined and locations shuttered in the face of the retail apocalypse. 

While some took off better than others — buy-online-pick-up-in-store continues to expand while the obsession with chatbot concierges has tapered off in recent years — each development changed the way consumers shop. 

Here's a closer look at 12 of the biggest innovations in retail technology over the past decade. 

The day of reckoning is coming.

Uber, and later Lyft, got consumers around the world hooked on ride-hailing with heavily subsidized rides. (You can thank Softbank, Saudi Arabia, and plenty of other venture-capital investors for that).

But things are different now. Following lackluster initial public offerings this year, both companies are under tremendous pressure from investors to turn a profit. The only way to get there — besides big job cuts — is convincing the public to pay what these rides actually cost to provide.

That's the hard part.

"We took a little bit of risk for the first time and led the market in two small, modest pricing increases over the last couple of quarters," Logan Green, Lyft's chief executive, said at a conference hosted by Credit Suisse last week.

For the most part, those were matched by the competition, he said without naming names (but heavily implying Uber). But when it came to ending the coupons that hit customers' inboxes and apps on a seemingly weekly basis in some markets, things were different.

"We sort of attempted to do the same thing in terms of couponing and lead in creating a more rational market," Green said. "We have not seen that matched. So we're going to change our stance, and we'll sort of revert to a match and follow position."

That shocked markets, sending Lyft's shares plunging as much as 6% in trading from the remarks through the end of the week.

It all comes down to what industry watchers call rationalization. In short, the oft-quoted word — as it relates to ride-hailing — simply means a switch away from heavily subsidized rides into a sustainable business model that can survive a recession and appease anxious investors.

Even Wall Street analysts don't know who might do it first, but agree that rationalization has to happen at some point.

"The US ride-hailing market is essentially a duopoly, and we believe both companies are highly motivated to behave rationally as both have publicly stated a timeline to profitability," Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies, said in a note to clients on Friday.

By his data, Uber has done more couponing than Lyft over the past few weeks, but has pulled back recently.

"Although we should continue to see occasional promotions, we believe the market's overall direction will be rational and reflect economic realities" Thill said. "We think permanent, heavy discounting is unsustainable and not the likely scenario."

Uber, for its part, hasn't publicly discussed couponing much (the company did not respond to a request for comment for this story). However, rationalization has increasingly been a topic of conversation by executives.

Nelson Chai, Uber's chief financial officer, said in November it's thanks to Lyft specifically that "the rationalization here has happened faster," than previously assumed.

"They're bogey in the sand," he said at the conference hosted by RBC in London. 

In the meantime, market share levels appear to have leveled by some measures, giving analysts confidence that rationality could come next. 

"Uber and Lyft appear to have settled into a ~60/40% share split, which we expect should be supportive of near-term margin improvement as driven by moderating driver bonuses and rider subsidies to the benefit of take-rates," Benjamin Black, an analyst at Evercore ISI, said in a note to clients last month. 

"Blade Runner" predicted that in 2019 we'd zoom around Los Angeles in flying cars, but that hasn't quite worked out. Although this forecast hasn't manifested in actual vehicles beyond basic prototypes, there's been no shortage of optimistic inventors eager to throw together their own designs. 

Scottish leasing comparison startup LeaseFetcher charged creative studio NeoMam with the task of bringing patent sketches to life with realistic renderings. The patents span from nearly 100 years ago in 1921 to as recently as 2016.

Flying cars no longer seem like the clear vision of the future that they once were. Waymo, Uber, Tesla, and other companies have instead turned their efforts towards self-driving technology, but these renderings offer a look at how people in the past envisioned the future. Scroll to see drawings from patents, and how designers rendered them.

The ascent of mobile devices and cloud computing spurred a new generation of startups that were mobile-first, or mobile-only, designing their products for smartphone users instead of desktop users. The same is happening for voice.

As more people equip their homes with smart speakers, displays, vacuums, and thermostats, a new crop of startups are racing to create apps for these voice-controlled devices. Others are testing the boundaries of voice computing with applications in cognitive neuroscience and early childhood development.

Startups are taking voice computing outside the home, with hands-free apps for the phone and voice-controlled games for the car. Paul Bernard, director of Amazon's corporate venture fund, Alexa Fund, said the rise of use cases that go beyond asking for the weather forecast or setting an alarm will help voice technology become mainstream.

"I've had my eye on the idea that Alexa would need to become untethered from the home at some point to fully manifest the vision of pervasive ambient voice computing," he said.

From new ways to shop to audio erotica, these are the voice-first startups to watch.

Instagram is making a huge move: It's dropping "likes" from the wildly popular photo- and video-sharing app for some users in an ambitious test.

You'll still be able to see the likes on your own posts, just not those of others, a move that Instagram head Adam Mosseri said is intended to "depressurize Instagram for young people." 

So the logic goes: If you can't see likes on other peoples' posts, you won't feel bad that your posts have fewer likes than theirs. "We will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people's well-being and health," Mosseri said at Wired25 in mid-November.

But that explanation isn't the full story, according to a new CNBC report. Apparently Facebook's growth and data science teams believe that hiding likes may actually increase user engagement.

In short: Without likes, people may post more.

More than just posting more, the theory goes, users will stay engaged with the app for longer periods of time — thus, boosting Facebook's potential ad revenue from Instagram users. 

Instagram declined to respond to Business Insider's request for comment. 

Though Mosseri has acknowledged the potential for this effect before, the explanation for removing likes from Instagram has repeatedly focused on efforts to make the platform less toxic. 

"It's about young people," Mosseri said at Wired25 in mid-November. "The idea is to try and depressurize Instagram, make it more of a competition, give people more space to focus on connecting with the people that they love, the things that inspire them. But it's really focused on young people."

Notably, for now, it's just a test, and the company hasn't announced more official plans for a permanent change. Even still, there's already been one unintended consequence: Instagram's most valuable users — influencers and celebrities — are threatening to leave if the platform eliminates likes. 

Mosseri has acknowledged that the change could have other consequences, like increasing user engagement — but that's not the point, he said.

"It'll likely effect [sic] how much some people engage on Instagram, probably liking a bit less and posting a bit more," Mosseri said on Twitter, "but the main thing we're trying to learn is how this effects how people feel."

2019 has been one of the most difficult years for the media industry in history.

More than 7,600 jobs were lost, compared to an estimated 5,000 between 2014 and 2017. That's approaching the recession high, when more than 7,000 journalism jobs were lost during the first five months of 2009.

Investors who poured millions into digital media upstarts earlier in the decade saw billions in estimated value disappear as those companies missed growth targets and were forced into downrounds, firesales, head-scratching mergers, and shutdowns.  

In one of the year's biggest deals, Vice Media acquired Refinery29, a company that had raised $133 million, for mostly stock. Group Nine Media also acquired fellow millennial media company Pop Sugar in a stock deal.

A third major tie-up saw Vox Media acquire New York Media, with the goal of future proofing both businesses.

"We've observed a spate of mergers and acquisitions in our sector and have often been struck by their lackluster rationales and ambitions," Vox CEO Jim Bankoff and New York Media owner Pam Wasserstein said at the time.  "Too many deals are done to buy some time or quickly change a narrative if a company has failed to innovate. By contrast, this combination is solely about leadership, growth, and opportunity." 

Bustle Digital Group emerged as a buyer of last resort, acquiring a string of sites including Inverse, Gawker, and The Outline, often at bargain-basement prices. 

Read: Insiders say morale at Bustle Digital Group is cratering as it quietly axes staff and loses focus

In most of those deals, the acquired companies lost a hefty chunk of their onetime valuations, signaling a sort of private-market correction.

Nicole Quinn, a partner at Lightspeed which made bets on Jon Steinberg's Cheddar (a successful $200 million cash acquisition) and Mic (a flop), said watching media business models over-rely on digital advertising has sharpened the firm's investing criteria. "It has made us more focused on companies that are capital-efficient and profitable," she said.

Observers predict more such deals in 2020 as there are still many small, independent digital outlets facing an unfriendly business climate. There are also still funders and buyers for digital startups that aren't wholly dependent on ad revenue, like The Athletic and Food52; niche sites like Byrdie, which sold to IAC; and older digital sites like BabyCenter, which sold this year to J2, a portfolio of internet media and services companies.

"I'm looking for digital brands that have durability, that have been able to sustain all the changes," said Vivek Shah, CEO of J2. "I will always value those that can stand the test of time."

The Athletic, the breakout media startup of the year, made waves by amassing a huge subscriber base of more than 600,000 sports fans. But the subscription revenue approach didn't work for every publisher. Take Quartz, which struggled to turn its free distribution, ad-based business model into a membership one. 

Still, there are some signals that digital media will turn a corner in 2020. Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures who has a knack for nailing startup trends, thinks now could be the perfect time to invest in media companies.

Digital media investment peaked in 2014, when venture capitalists invested $1.1 billion into 82 digital media startups — three times what they invested the year prior, according to Pitchbook. By 2018, that figure had fallen to $237 million, though it has rebounded to more than $537 million in 2019.

"We're intrigued about what looks like a little bit of a vacuum now in media," Wilson told Business Insider in a recent interview. "I like to zig when other people zag. I like to get to things before people get into them or when other people have gotten out of them. Those are generally the good time to invest in companies."

So far, the size of Wilson's bets are relatively small as he tests the waters. He recently invested $5 million in video news startup on The Recount, not $50 million like in digital media's heyday.

GroupNine CEO Ben Lerer believes some of the tough decisions made this year will result in longer-term success.

"We went from the perception that it was an industry without a plan or a path to one where there's a much clearer set of winners," he told Business Insider.

"There was a destruction of value from a perceived value standpoint. I do think there was a creation or meaningful value protection with some of the combinations that happened. We all have a lot of work to do. But we are coming out of 2019 so much stronger than we were."

Go deeper into recent digital media trends:

Artificially intelligent machines could soon join the ranks of the world's greatest inventors.

There is a legal battle brewing over whether robot inventors should be granted the same recognition as human creators.

That's being led by an international squad of legal experts, which has revealed plans to recruit patent lawyers from around the world in an attempt to upend "outdated" rules disqualifying AI inventors.

The group argues that autonomous machines shouldn't be barred from being inventors, and that their designs deserve protection.

As the capacity for artificial intelligence to come up with original ideas has rapidly improved, legislators everywhere have been scrambling to figure out how to respond. Can an AI own intellectual property?

The six-strong group from around the world first made headlines in July after submitting patents designed by an artificially intelligent machine with US, UK and EU authorities.

Dabus is an AI inventor which invented a new type of food container and a lamp

The team is battling to recognise a particular AI inventor called Dabus.

Dabus, the creation of Missouri-based AI expert Dr Stephen Thaler, was fed a wealth of information including a number of abstract concepts related to design, practicality, colour and emotion. Afterwards, the AI was able to design two original inventions of its own.

The first was a "fractal food container", a kind of lunchbox capable of changing its shape, making it an easier fit for a range of different foodstuffs, and easier for prosthetic or robotic limbs to grip.

The second was a flickering lamp, or "neural flame" as the team dubbed it, which mimics brain activity in a way that theoretically draws more attention from the human eye. The application suggested this could be used in emergency situations in order to draw the attention of rescue services.

We could enter a new age of AI inventors

While the initial applications including Dabus have yet to be officially decided on, the team said they intended to target more patent offices around the world – and have already submitted designs in the Middle East and Asia.

Ryan Abbott, a professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey, exclusively told Business Insider the six-strong team of patent attorneys had submitted Dabus' designs to authorities in Israel, Taiwan and Germany – with more in the pipeline.

"Since we originally submitted the designs, we've received a lot of interest from lawyers in different jurisdictions," said Prof Abbott. "So now we're actively recruiting experts around the world, so that we can have the best chance of navigating local patent laws, and long-term achieving some change at the international level."

The newest member of the team, Peggy Wu, is executive manager at Top Team, one of the biggest intellectual property firms in Taiwan.

Wu told Business Insider she agreed to join the team after realising machine inventors were "no longer confined to science fiction".

"I had seen some articles talking about AI inventors, but hadn't paid serious attention to it," she said. "But after speaking to the team, I realised how important it was – we are already living in the age of AI inventors.

"The main idea behind the patent system is to improve the development of industry... If AI-generated inventions can't be protected by patent rights, it's very likely the big players with AI powers will keep their inventions as trade secrets. I think that would be a boundary to shared knowledge and polarize the competition."

Since the team submitted their applications, authorities have begun engaging with the question of machine inventors more publicly.

In October, the UK Intellectual Property Office quietly issued an update to its guidance on inventorship, saying an inventor had to be "a person" and that applications listing an AI would be withdrawn.

Across the Atlantic, the US Patent and Trademark Office published a notice saying it was seeking comments from the public on the rules around patents designed by artificial inventors.

Business Insider approached the Israel Patent Office, German Patent and Trademark Office, and Taiwan Intellectual Property Office for comment.