By Miho Uranaka OSAKA, Japan The battery arm of Japan's Panasonic will need to build around four more

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COLLEGE PARK, Md. & SEOUL, South Korea--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 29, 2023--

By Yimou Lee and Ann Wang TAIPEI Southern Taiwan on Thursday shut businesses and schools while airlines cancelled

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As Twitter has become a platform for news and heated political debate, rival upstart Threads

When it comes to maintaining an online presence, creators are always looking to be ahead of the curve. Currently, the latest trend that has popped up all over people's For You page is NPC streaming. The basis of this trend is that streamers bizarrely repeat actions over and over again - so what is it all about? Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Here is a breakdown of everything you need to know about the NPC streaming trend. What is NPC streaming? NPC streaming is where the streamers appear animated through their actions, hence being comparable to gaming NPCs, where they often repeat their movements or sayings. In this context, TikTok streamers only interact, speak or perform a specific action when they receive a gift from a viewer, the type of interaction can be dependent on the type of gift. @bobbysie Btw i love ohio final boss and queen Viewers can send a variety of different options such as emotes to the streamer to respond to. For instance, a viewer sends an ice cream and in response, the streamer's reaction would be to pretend to lick it and say “Oh ice cream yum”. Where did this trend begin? Last year, NPC streaming began to rise in popularity, according to Know Your Meme where it all started from Japanese TikToker @natuecoco. She has collaborated with TikToker Satoyu0704 the two of them pretended to be NPCs as they went on to see who could get the most prizes. Over the past year more creators such as Cherry Crush TV and PinkDollReal have been doing popular NPC live streams. Why is this a trend? Perhaps, the reason for the rising popularity of NPC streaming is people's curiosity to see the creator acting like an AI or a character for a video game and want to see if they can keep this act up. Also compared to your average stream, NPC streaming requires increased interaction from the viewer as the streamer is constantly responding to what is being said and sent to them. The trend appears to have celebrity fans, with music producer Timberland reportedly being the #1 viewer on a recent TikTok Live from 19-year-old viral content creator Pinkydoll, according to Pop Crave. Pinkydoll has recently been going viral in July 2023 with her NPC streams where she does things such as popping popcorn with a hair straightener. As a result of Timberland's presence, it caused Pinkydoll to break character. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Meta’s new Threads app will not let people leave without deleting their whole Instagram account, its rules warn. The app launched just hours ago and appears to have already received tens of millions of signups. It came at a particularly difficult time for Twitter – which has been limiting how many posts people can see – and has tight integration with Instagram, which makes it easy to sign up. However, people are not able to reverse that signup process once it has happened, users have found. If someone starts using Threads, and then wants to leave again, they will be forced to delete their entire Instagram account. Threads users can “deactivate” their profile, which will stop posts and interactions with other people’s posts from being shown. But that data will continue to live on parent company Meta’s servers, and will remain connected to the Instagram account it came from. Users can also delete all of their individual posts on Threads. As on most social networks, that has to be done one-by-one, with a user scrolling through their own account and deleting each post individually. But it is not possible to fully delete it without getting rid of all Instagram data. “Your Threads profile is part of your Instagram account, and may be deleted at any time by deleting your Instagram account,” a supplemental privacy policy published for Threads warns. Meta has said that it is working on the problem, presumably with a view to allowing people to get rid of their Threads account without deleting all of their data. The issue is just one of a range of problems that users have identified on the first day with Instagram’s Threads app. Many other users have complained, for instance, that there is no way to see only posts from accounts that they have actually followed. Instagram has built Threads to recommend posts from other accounts it thinks users are interested in, too – presumably in an attempt to ensure that the news feed is full up even when users start using the app. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has also confirmed on Threads that the company is working on that feature too. Mr Mosseri faced sharp criticism in recent months over the increasing amount of algorithmically chosen content being pushed into users feeds on the normal version of Instagram. Read More Threads: What it’s like to use Instagram’s new Twitter rival How to get and use ‘Threads’, the biggest new social app Mark Zuckerberg launches his ‘Twitter killer’ app called Threads

SAN JOSE, Calif. & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 7, 2023--

Here's why was xQc shocked when he received a donation from a fan