In 2022, the amount of corporate data stored in the cloud (versus on-premise servers) reached 60%, a signal of how the world of enterprise IT is evolving. But lest you think that cloud=modern=more efficient, when it comes to security, the picture is more complicated: multiple silos mean multiple challenges to visibility, creating security vulnerabilities and resulting in half of all data breaches last year happening in the cloud, according to IBM.

Now a startup called Dig Security, which is building security tools specifically to address that complexity, has raised investment that speaks to the demand it’s seeing.

The company — which assesses and the provides real-time monitoring for clients’ data assets sitting multi-cloud-based environments — has raised $34 million, a Series A investment that it’s going to be using to continue expanding its platform.

The startup’s focus today, said Dan Benjamin, CEO and co-founder, is on data in public rather than private clouds. It integrates with all of the major providers — Azure, AWS, Google Cloud — as well as big names in data warehousing like Snowflake and Databricks, and the services that it provides include data security posture management (DSPM), data loss prevention (DLP), and data detection and response (DDR).

The investment is being led by SignalFire, with Felicis Ventures, Okta Ventures and previous backer, cybersecurity-specialist incubator and investor Team8, also participating. Dig emerged from stealth and announced its $11 million seed round only in May of this year. The reason for the rapid follow-up is that the seed round had actually closed (and been used) some time before it was actually announced, said Benjamin; and because the emergence from stealth found the company getting a lot of inbound contacts from customers and investors.

Okta Ventures, the strategic investment arm of the identity and access management giant, falls into both of those categories: Dig has a strong integration with Okra’s sign-in management products to both monitor potentially malicious activity and also to help set up stronger protections to head off bad actors before they take hold.

Dig’s founders — Benjamin, Ido Azran (VP of R&D) and Gad Akuka CTO) — are repeat founders who have track records at companies like Microsoft, Google, Mimecast, SAP and more, and as Benjamin explained it, there is a strong argument for a big third-party player to provide security services for cloud data, simply because it’s grown up to be a huge, but very fragmented market with no proprietary ‘owner’: because of the prevalence of micro services, organizations rarely use only one service like AWS or Azure; and data is run over multiple instances.

“A typical organization has 30 different types of data stores across tens of thousands of instances,” Benjamin said. Even a smaller organization might have 10 different types of data stores.

This means that while a cloud company might develop strong cloud security product, we are still some ways away from those products working effectively across data regardless of where it is.

I should also point out that Benjamin also predicted that approach would likely change over time: he worked in corporate development at Microsoft and knows that the appetite among big players like these will be to see how cloud data security companies — like Dig — will evolve over the coming years and potentially snap one up to bolt on that kind of functionality.

For now, however, companies like Dig have a clear opportunity to make some traction in the market.

“Dig is uniquely positioned to help make DDR the standard for data security,” said Nir Polak, venture partner at SignalFire, who himself has a strong cyber profile as the founder and chairman of Exabeam. “The rise of remote work and the increasingly high stakes of cloud attacks require real-time data security capabilities – too many organizations remain exposed to the risks that lurk behind the public cloud. SignalFire is thrilled to support Dig as the only vendor in the cloud data security market that provides real-time data protection across any cloud and any data store.”

It is not the only player here: a number of others are also moving in on the opportunity to provide more holistic security approaches to bridge the fragmentation of most enterprise environments. Others that have raised big funds include Laminar, HYCU, vArmour, JupiterOne. Bigger tech companies that are making acquisitions to bring more multi-cloud management and security capabilities into their platforms include Google acquiring Siemplify, and F5 buying NGINX.

Dig scoops up $34M to tackle the fragmented world of cloud data security by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Google’s appeal against a €4.34 billion antitrust fine handed down by the European Union four years ago, after the bloc’s competition regulator found major violations in how it operated its Android mobile OS, has not succeeded in overturning the decision: The EU’s General Court largely confirmed the Commission’s decision in a ruling issued today.

It’s a much needed win for the EU which has had a number of its antitrust decision unpicked by the courts in recent years.

Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson sent us this brief line:

“We are disappointed that the Court did not annul the decision in full. Android has created more choice for everyone, not less, and supports thousands of successful businesses in Europe and around the world.”

The size of the fine issued by the EU to Google over the Android violations in July 2018 equated to a record-breaking $5BN at the time — and it remains unsurpassed for an EU antitrust sanction.

However the General Court has revised the size of the fine downward slightly — setting the final amount imposed on Google at (a still record-breaking) €4.125BN (~$4.3BN at current currency conversion rates which have seen the dollar and euro hit near parity).

A spokesperson for the Court said: “The General Court largely confirms the Commission’s decision that Google imposed unlawful restrictions on manufacturers of Android mobile devices and mobile network operators in order to consolidate the dominant position of its search engine.

“In order better to reflect the gravity and duration of the infringement, the General Court considers it appropriate however to impose a fine of €4.125BN on Google, its reasoning differing in certain respects from that of the Commission.”

Google had sought to argue that the Commission had made an error in its definition of the relevant markets and that its assessment of the restrictions Google imposed on device makers and carriers as abusive was incorrect, among a number of pleas its lawyers put to the Court.

The Court largely rejected its arguments — but in the case of a pre-installation condition included in portfolio-based revenue share agreements (with mobile makers and carriers) the justices did it find fault with the Commission’s reasoning (and some procedural errors), thereby upholding Google’s plea that the exclusivity agreements were not abusive and annulling that part of the Commission decision.

A Court press release summarizing the ruling notes that “that partial annulment does not affect the overall validity of the [infringement] finding… in the light of the exclusionary effects arising from the other abusive practices implemented by Google during the infringement period” — but this element of the ruling explains the slight downward revision of the final fine.

In setting the final amount, the Court said it took account of “the intentional nature of the implementation of the unlawful practices and of the value of relevant sales made by Google in the last year of its full participation in the infringement”, per the press release.

Should Google wish to appeal the General Court decision to the bloc’s top court, the European Court of Justice (CJEU), it may only do so on a point of law — with a timeframe of two months and ten days to file such a petition.

It’s not clear whether the company will seek to bring a point of law appeal to the CJEU. The company told us it is reviewing the judgement before deciding on any next steps.

The Commission has also been contacted for comment.

At the time of writing competition chief Margrethe Vestager had not posted publicly on the win but her Twitter account retweeted the Court’s press announcement…

Screengrab: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch

Consumer groups and Google rivals were quick to welcome the Court’s decision.

In a statement, Monique Goyens, the director general of BEUC, the European consumer organization, dubbed the ruling a “crucial” win for consumers:

“Today’s General Court ruling on Google’s practices concerning Android is crucial because it confirms that Europe’s consumers must enjoy meaningful choice between search engines and browsers on their phones and tablets. The Court ruling makes clear that Google cannot abuse its strong market position to unfairly exclude competitors through a complex and illegal web of restrictions and requirements for phone manufacturers. The ruling will help to ensure that consumers can benefit from a more open and innovative digital environment,” she said, adding: “Google’s restrictions harmed many millions of European consumers by depriving them of genuine choice and innovation for a decade. In practice, many European consumers had no alternative to using Google’s search engine and Google’s browser Chrome on their mobile devices. If they preferred, for example, to use more innovative and privacy-friendly services, Google’s restrictions prevented them from doing so.”

While Ecosia, the environmentally focused not-for-profit search engines that competes with Google search — and has been a vocal critic of how the tech giant responded with ‘remedies’ following the antitrust decision — also welcomed the ruling, while emphasizing how much marketshare Google still retains in the region.

“Today’s decision is a significant victory for the European Commission (EC) and is a continuation of a positive trend in Europe towards fairer competition in the online search market,” said Sophie Dembinski, its head of public policy, in a statement. “Much remains to be done to bring about true fairness in the space — Google still maintains a 96.6% market share on mobile devices in Europe, down only 0.3% since 2018 when this ruling was initially made — thanks to the EC and European Parliament’s heroic efforts with the Digital Markets Act, this ruling strengthens the EU’s overall position as a leading regulatory force, capable of keeping up with fast-moving developments in the tech sector and taking the action necessary to hold tech giants accountable — something which European consumers and businesses alike will benefit from.”

The 2018 EU Android decision

The 2018 EU competition Commission decision against Android found Google had abused its dominant position by imposing anticompetitive contractual restrictions on manufacturers of mobile devices using its Android OS and on mobile network operators, in some cases since the start of 2011.

The three types of restrictions the Commission identified and sanctioned were found in contract clauses in distribution agreements: Those which required mobile device makers to pre-install Google Search and its Chrome browser apps in order to be able to obtain a licence from Google to use its app store — the popular Play Store; certain ‘anti-fragmentation’ agreements Google imposed on device makers that wanted to pre-install Google Search and Play Store which required them to undertake not to sell devices running versions of the Android operating system not approved by Google; and those contained in ‘revenue share agreements’, under which a cut of Google’s advertising revenue provided to device makers and mobile network operators was subject to their undertaking not to pre-install a competing general search service on a predefined portfolio of devices.

The Court did not agree with the Commission’s assessment that the latter restriction was abusive, as noted above.

As well as being sanctioned with a massive fine for the breaches, Google was ordered four years ago to cease the infringements. However the bloc’s competition regulator allowed the company to configure its own remedy. That resulted in several frustrating years for search competitors after Google started offering a choice screen to Android users in the EU but quickly moved to a paid auction model for assigning slots — thereby, they argued, creating an unfairly skewed playing field which penalized smaller, less well resourced competitors and those with not-for-profit business models.

It was only after further pressure from the EU that Google agreed to drop the paid auction — switching to a choice screen that’s free for eligible participants last year. At the same time it also expanded the number of participants displayed, showing a ‘top five’ (determined by per market popularity but displayed in a randomized order — so, of course, Google is always one of these top options given its regional marketshare… ) — after which, if the user chooses to keep scrolling, they can see up to seven further options (displayed in random order). If there are more than seven additional eligible options for the market Google says the choice of which it displays is also picked randomly.

The Court ruling largely upholding the EU’s Android decision suggests these choice screens are here to stay.

More such regulation-driven interventions could be on the way as the bloc starts to enforce updated competition rules on the most powerful “gatekeeping” platforms — under the incoming Digital Markets Act (DMA).

And it’s fair to say that EU lawmakers have taken their years of learnings from antitrust wrangles with tech giants such as Google and baked them into shaping the proactive operational rules that will be imposed on core platform services that fall in scope of the DMA. So the legacy attached to Google’s antitrust enforcements will be a lasting one.

Antitrust activity dialling up across Europe

The EU’s antitrust division has been very active in investigating Google over the past five+ years, landing a string of enforcements — including a $2.7BN fine related to shopping searches back in 2017 (which Google largely failed to overturn on appeal).

Google was also fined $1.7BN in a case related to AdSense, its search ad brokering business, in 2019. (Its appeal there is ongoing.)

The competition Commission also has an ongoing probe into Google’s adtech — opened in June 2021. And, on Friday, Reuters reported that the EU had widened this investigation.

The bloc is also looking into an ad deal between Google and Facebook — known as ‘Jedi Blue’.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has similar probes of Google’s adtech ongoing too. As well as expressed concerns about the mobile duopoly — one half of which is Google Android.

While Germany’s antitrust scrutiny of the company — which touches a number of fronts — stepped up a gear at the start of this year when its regulator determined the tech giant falls under a special abuse controls regime brought in under a major reform of digital competition rules that’s aimed at tech giants’ market muscle.

France has also been aggressive in probing a variety of competition concerns around Google. And this summer the company dropped an appeal against an antitrust fine of well over half a billion dollars that France’s competition watchdog hit it with in July 2021 — related to breaches in how it negotiated terms with news publishers over copyright licensing.

All this regulatory activity is also leading to an uptick in antitrust litigation aimed at tech giants.

Google fails to overturn EU’s €4BN+ Android antitrust decision by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

It’s become increasingly difficult to estimate how much money Apple’s App Store business makes, as it’s lumped in with other services on Apple’s balance sheet — and because Apple has adjusted its commission structure so it’s no longer a flat 30% across the board, making it difficult to work backward from the public figures Apple does provide to narrow down its numbers. But a new report indicates that overall, the prices consumers are paying to engage with apps listed on the App Store have grown considerably — a suggestion that Apple’s own cut has grown, as well.

And what’s more, this growth is not entirely organic, the report suggests. Rather, it’s more closely linked to Apple’s privacy changes — App Tracking Transparency, or ATT — instead of inflation or the broader macroeconomic factors that have impacted tech companies as of late.

Image Credits: Apptopia

This new data come from app intelligence firm Apptopia, which found that the average price of in-app purchases (IAP) on the App Store has climbed 40% since last year, while Google Play IAP prices only saw a 9% increase during that same time frame. The firm analyzed pricing across both app marketplaces between July 2021 to July 2022 to reach its conclusions.

Apptopia suspects ATT’s 2021 introduction is behind the rising prices for in-app purchases because the increases kick in before inflation began to hit the economy hard in 2022. In other words, it appears that app publishers were adjusting their rates in reaction to the increased effective cost per install (eCPI) that came about after Apple’s ATT made it more costly to acquire new users. To support this conclusion, the report cites data from measurement company Adjust which shows how the growth in eCPI directly correlates with the IAP price increases.

Image Credits: Apptopia & Adjust data

In addition, if the growing prices were more of a reaction to inflation than ATT, then it would go to reason that similar trends would be seen across Google Play — but that’s not the case. While it’s true that Google Play historically pulls in less overall revenue than the App Store through things like paid downloads, in-app purchases and subscriptions, it still hosts a number of apps reliant on in-app purchases to monetize. But Google Play’s average in-app purchase price increase was only in the single digits, compared with Apple’s 40%.

This news follows another recent report which found that ATT had helped boost Apple’s advertising business, as well, allowing it to earn a spot amid the Facebook-Google duopoly.

Apptopia’s new report also broke down how the different types of in-app purchases were impacted by the price changes.

It found that the average pricing of iOS single-purchase in-app purchases grew 36% year-over-year while other in-app purchases, including monthly and annual subscription options, grew only 19%.

Image Credits: Apptopia

The top iOS categories seeing the largest in-app purchase price increases were Navigation, Travel, Photo & Video, Sports, and Books. Food & Drink, Beauty and Events led the group on Google Play, though the overall average IAP price increases were much lower.

Apple’s in-app purchase prices jumped 40% year-over-year, likely tied to privacy changes by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

In the new era of remote and hybrid working, companies need to manage people who either relocate to join, or work remotely. For obvious reasons, that has created a huge headache for HR directors.

Back in 2014, FlatClub had an apartment rental platform. But a chance encounter encouraged them to pivot in 2017 to become Benivo, a B2B SaaS HR platform solution for mobile or moving workforces. The then used the funding and revenues from the consumer business to scale up the new company.

The result is a $12m growth funding round led by Updata Partners, a Growth Equity Fund, which brings the total amount invested in the company to $30m. Not bad for a start-up that began with apartments.

Playing in a similar space to Benivo is Topia, formerly MoveGuides which has burned through around $140m. Benivo has now managed to secure clients including Google, Mondelez, General Electric,  Phillips 66, Unity, Wayfair, CGI, Bloomberg and around 50 others. 

The so-called ‘global mobility’ market is pretty large but many processes are still manual and often require the use of several platforms by staff or their companies.

Benivo’s pitch is that it uses AI to automate and predictive analytics to help that poor person in HR who needs to move staff around, or monitor where the hell they are going.

Founder Nitzan Yudan tells me the journey started in Silicon Roundabout’s original startup co-working space TechHub, when a chance meeting with the Google HR team resulted in the idea to pivot in this new direction.

“Despite presenting Google with the ugliest page in the history of internet pages (which was our not-even-MVP product then), they cared about their employees and really wanted to solve a problem. So they went ahead with us. With Google as our first client, deciding to pivot from the consumer business and stop competing with Airbnb was a natural step for the company,” he said via email.

Benivo says it competes on various levels with ‘Assignment Management Systems such as Equus, Topia, KPMG and ‘Relocation Management Companies’ such as SIRVA, WIchert, Cartus, BGRS, AIRES, Altair), but addresses both issues with a single platform.

The company will use the new funding to grow its teams in the US, UK, Armenia, and India.

Can this startup solve the HR headache that is digital nomads? It just raised $12M to try by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Engineering innovations are a critical cornerstone in the evolution of technology, but ironically there haven’t been as many innovations in engineers’ tooling itself. Now, a startup called Liquid Instruments that’s devised a set of software and hardware to help engineers carry out one aspect of their work — testing — more efficiently is announcing a capital injection of $28.5 million to fuel its growth. It’s been on a roll with sales up 4x this year, with customers of its devices including NASA (where the founders first worked on the concept), Google and Qualcomm, Stanford and Duke, and the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Moore’s Law is alive and well here: the startup’s unique selling point is that it has built a new take on testing equipment by translating much of the process into software that sits on hardware that’s faster, many times smaller, and less costly than traditional testing equipment, and provides other kinds of flexibility, such as more dynamic visualizations, diagnostics, programability and the ability to work on the tests in the cloud.

This Series B round of equity funding, which I understand values the company at north of $100 million, will help Liquid Instruments continue to build out more hardware models, and to write more software-based more testing tools for those devices.

The company — founded originally in Australia and now officially headquartered in San Francisco — today sells three versions of its Moku hardware — the Go, the Lab and the Pro, respectively starting at $599, $3,500 and $12,000. They are part of a bigger area of software-defined test instrumentation, and Daniel Shaddock, the CEO and co-founder, first worked on a version of this tech when he was on a team building testing equipment in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for high precision wave detection using a similar software-defined approach.

After that project was done, Shaddock said he and some 11 others would have been “scattered to the wind”, working at other space agencies or academia, so he suggested that maybe they continue working together, to see how a similar concept could be applied to building testing equipment for the engineering world and academics at large. “It was great measurement technology,” he said, “so we thought, maybe others might like it, too.”

The devices use standard input ports and are based on flexible FPGA chip architecture. Today those chips are Xilinx chips from AMD, but the company is open to using “whatever the chip du jour might be” said Shaddock. That’s because its IP is not about the chips but about how they’re used to work “at the crossroads of analogue circuitry and digital processing,” he said. “What has been done previously on analogue devices, and distributed across many chips, are now all on FPGA chips. Now that they are larger, we can slice up the chip into more functions, and have them all work together.”

Although this is bringing down the price of testing devices, it’s not exactly putting Liquid Instruments into the category electronics companies building tools for hobbyists. Its customers rather span research and education through to government labs and industrial businesses, with applications including aerospace, defense, semiconductor, LiDAR and quantum computing. And it’s finding a lot of traction in all of them, with sales up four-fold in the last year.

The investors in this round also are a testament to its traction. Led by Acorn Capital, it also includes strategics like Lockheed Martin Ventures and Powerhouse Ventures, as well as previous backers Spirit Super/ANU Connect Ventures, MA Growth Ventures, Significant Capital Ventures, and Boman Enterprises. Liquid Instruments has to date raised $50 million.

“Liquid Instruments is creating a versatile test and measurement platform that is customizable and efficient,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures, in a statement. “This technology has the potential to deliver mission critical functionality that can provide value to our customer. We are excited by Liquid’s continued growth and look forward to strengthening our collaboration.”

“Liquid Instruments’ Australian-developed software-defined approach is the manifestation of an ambitious plan targeting a vital market that has suffered from a deficit of innovation and imagination.” added Robert Routley, CEO, Acorn Capital. “We see tremendous potential for their platform to continue to grow and evolve, benefitting more industries over time. Liquid Instruments is well positioned to execute on its expansion strategy and disrupt the test and measurement sector and lead the industry through the much-needed transition from hardware to software.”

“This injection of capital will supercharge our ability to revolutionize the test and measurement industry,” said Daniel Shaddock, CEO, and co-founder of Liquid Instruments. “Our innovative software-first approach provides clear advantages over traditional hardware-based solutions, and this funding strongly positions us to lead this critical industry transformation.”

Liquid Instruments’ Moku product line offers the world’s most powerful and flexible software-defined instrumentation platform, harnessing the processing power and reconfigurability of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to combine multiple instruments into one compact and accessible device. These product offerings include the Moku:Go, a complete lab solution for engineers and students to actively test designs and projects, and the Moku:Pro, an integrated platform for the most demanding research and engineering applications.

“We are focused on enhancing cloud integration features for our products and scaling production of Moku:Go to help millions of undergraduate engineering students around the world unlock their full potential,” added Shaddock. “Moku’s will continue to receive new features via frequent over-the-air updates enabling new solutions in key commercial industries.”

Liquid Instruments hooks up with $28.5M to upend the engineering testing market with software-defined instrumentation by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

More antitrust litigation targeting Big (ad)Tech: Google is being sued in the UK and the Netherlands where two suits have been announced today seeking damages on behalf of publishers who claim they have been harmed by anti-competitive adtech practices.

Per Reuters, publishers are seeking up to €25 billion in damages from Google for lost ad revenues via the litigation.

Google’s adtech stack — and certain other ad-related practices  — are currently under investigation by both EU and UK competition authorities. However, last year France’s antitrust watchdog found the tech giant had abused a dominant position for ad servers for website publishers and mobile apps — fining Google up to €220 million for a variety of self-preferencing abuses; and extracting a series of interoperability commitments. The French regulator dubbed the case a world first in probing its complex algorithmic ad auctions.

The tech giant did not dispute the facts of the French case — and that appears to have given succour to the litigants.

Law firm, Geradin Partners, which acted for complainants in the French Competition Authority case, is leading the UK and EU damages actions. “The French Competition Authority found Google had abused its dominant position by engaging in various forms of self-preferencing in breach of Article 102 TFEU,” it noted in a press release. “Specifically, Google used its publisher ad servers by favouring its own ad exchange and had used its ad exchange to favour its publisher ad server. Both practices had been in place since 2014. Google’s anticompetitive conduct was found to have caused harm to publishers. Google did not contest the findings.”

Commenting in a statement, Damien Geradin of Geradin Partners, added: “Publishers, including local and national news media who play a vital role in our society, have long been harmed by Google’s anticompetitive conduct. It is time that Google owns up to its responsibilities and pays back the damages it has caused to this important industry. That is why today we are announcing these actions across two jurisdictions to obtain compensation for EU and UK publishers.”

Both legal actions are being funded by London-based litigation funder, Harbour — which touts a 76% “success rate” on its website.

The Dutch action is a collective damages claim representing EU publishers. While, in the UK, the litigants intend to bring an opt-out claim to the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which the law firm said will focus on recovering compensation for lost revenue from the sale of advertising space on the websites of class members. (The parallel claims likely reflect differences in legal regimes for bringing competition class-action style claims inside and outside the EU.) 

Reached for a response to the litigation, a Google spokesperson attached the suits as “speculative and opportunistic”.

Here’s its statement:

“Google works constructively with publishers across Europe — our advertising tools, and those of our many adtech competitors, help millions of websites and apps fund their content, and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers. These services adapt and evolve in partnership with those same publishers. This lawsuit is speculative and opportunistic. When we receive the complaint, we’ll fight it vigorously.”

Google has already faced a hefty bill related to its dealings with news publishers in France — following a €500BN fine by the competition regulator for breaching an earlier order to fairly negotiate copyright fees for use of snippets of publishers’ content (following a 2019 reform of EU digital copyright law).

But successful antitrust litigation could substantially crank up Google’s costs. And it’s worth noting that, in recent years, an EU directive was adopted that’s intended to remove obstacles to consumers and businesses bringing antitrust damages actions across the bloc.

Separately, Google is being sued in Europe by price comparison service, PriceRunner — which is seeking a few billions in damages after accusing it of breaching a 2017 EU antitrust order related to its product price comparison service.

While — since 2019 — Google’s adtech has been under formal investigation by its lead privacy regulator in the bloc, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, following a series of complaints targeting the behavioral ad industry’s abusive surveillance of web users.

Returning to antitrust litigation, in another recent opt-out competition class claim targeting big adtech, Facebook’s parent entity, Meta, is currently being sued for damages on behalf of UK users. In that case the litigant alleges the social networking giant imposed unfair terms, prices and/or other trading conditions on Facebook users — including by requiring users to hand over their personal data as a condition of access to the Facebook social network, and failing to share with users the profits it makes from such data — linking a loss of privacy to a claim of anti-competitive conduct.

A certification hearing is due to take place at the end of January which will determine whether or not the antitrust case against Meta proceeds.

Google’s adtech practices targeted in UK, EU antitrust damages suits by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Google announced this morning it will bring access to a number of its popular apps, including Search, Maps, Gmail and more, to the iPhone’s Lock Screen. With the updated version of Apple’s mobile operating system — iOS 16, releasing today — iPhone owners are now able to customize their device by adding widgets to their Lock Screen, instead of only their Home Screen, as before.

These mini widgets come in three sizes: circular and rectangular, which appear below the Lock Screen’s clock, and inline, which appears above the clock as a line of text and symbols.

Google’s widgets will take advantage of all three formats.

The company, in a blog post, previewed its iOS 16 widgets, which include a Search widget that lets you begin a Google search from the Lock Screen, even using your voice or camera (Google Lens). This widget will additionally offer a Google Translate widget, as well.

Image Credits: Google

Similarly, a new Chrome Lock Screen widget will allow users to start a search, including a voice search, but will also offer a button to quickly launch an incognito mode search. It includes a widget that adds Chrome’s dino game, which typically appears when Chrome is offline, as a Lock Screen option, too. (While we love the dino game, we can’t imagine giving up our limited Lock Screen real estate for this one — but to each their own!)

The new Google Drive Lock Screen widget, meanwhile, will allow you to open a suggested Drive file or Starred files and folders with a tap, which could be useful for business-focused Lock Screens.

And the Gmail widget will help you keep an eye on your inbox. This widget comes in all three sizes, as the inline widget can appear above the clock to show a shortened date (like “Wed 7”), followed by the number of new messages in the inbox. A rectangular widget breaks down how many new messages are in each category — like Social, Updates, or Promotions — which helps users better understand if the incoming mail is actually important. A smaller, circular widget simply displays how many new messages you have.

Image Credits: Google

Another app, Google Maps, is also adding Lock Screen widgets following the iOS 16 release. These will be useful for travelers and commuters as the widgets will offer real-time traffic updates and estimated travel times to places like your office or home address. Additional widgets will also let you tap to find restaurants, shops, coffee, or hotels along your route.

Image Credits: Google

Finally, a Google News widget brings short headlines to the Lock Screen, which can be tapped on to launch the Google News app.

Google had previously launched Home Screen widgets when they first became available with the launch of iOS 14 in 2020, then bringing interactive elements for many of these same apps — including Gmail, Drive, Chrome and others — to users’ Home Screens. But one widget that it offers on the Home Screen is missing from this new collection of Lock Screen widgets: Google Calendar. That seems an odd oversight given that meetings and events are the sorts of at-a-glance information that many would want quick access to, like the Lock Screen provides. Hopefully, this widget’s launch is just delayed but still in the works.

The company didn’t offer an exact time frame the new Lock Screen widgets would become available, only that they’ll roll out in the weeks ahead.

Google introduces a set of iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets for your iPhone by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Imagine yourself working at Apple. It’s April 2022. You’re being told by the higher-ups that you’ve got to come back to the office — by which I mean you’ve read a Slack message on your laptop. You continue your workday, pissed that your bosses don’t seem to understand that you can do this job remotely.

Then somebody sends you a YouTube link to a nine-minute commercial for remote work, telling the story of a group of people who quit their company after being forced to return to the office. The advertisement is by Apple, which is currently telling you to go back to the office. You punch your desk so hard that your screensaver deactivates.

It’s strange that the companies that have made so much money off remote work seem to be the most allergic to its possibilities. Google, which literally lets you run a company in a browser, has been forcing workers back to offices three days a week.

Meta, which has lost billions trying to make us live in the computer, has also made people return to the office. In reading almost every remote-work article that has been published for a year for my research, I have yet to find a single compelling argument about why employees should go back to the office.

“In-person collaboration” and “serendipity” are terms that make sense if you live in Narnia and believe in magical creatures. In reality, office environments resemble our remote lives, only with more annoying meetings and the chance to smell our co-workers’ lunch choices.

The tech industry pretends to be disruptive, but is following a path forged by older companies like Goldman Sachs. How is it that Apple and Google, the companies that effectively gave us the ability to remote work at scale, sound like they’re reading from a generic New York Times anti-remote op-ed?

The tech industry needs a labor movement by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

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Top Stories

Apple debuts new iPhones — and new ways for app developers to reach users

Image Credits: Apple

Like clockwork, Apple held its annual fall event this week to introduce the latest iPhones to the public. The iPhone 14 line brings some notable new features, like the always-on display for the Pro models, emergency satellite connectivity and the removal of the SIM tray in the U.S. in favor of eSIM support, along with other updated specs across the devices’ camera systems, chips, sensors and more.

But what will most intrigue app developers are a few other changes — both expected and unexpected.

With the updated mobile operating system iOS 16, developers will have a way to reach their users directly from the phone’s Lock Screen, thanks to the new widget platform. Announced at this year’s WWDC, these new widgets join a larger Lock Screen makeover that now includes a built-in editor, wallpaper gallery, theming tools and a Live Activities feature for delivering real-time updates to this key iPhone real estate.

With WidgetKit, developers will be able to build using the same code for both watchOS and the Lock Screen, Apple had explained at WWDC. On the iPhone’s Lock Screen, they can choose from three widget designs: circular, rectangular and inline — the latter being a way to convey information with a small amount of text and SF Symbols above the Lock Screen’s clock, instead of below it like the other two.

Already, developers are coming up with clever ways to take advantage of this new screen space.

In some cases, they see the Lock Screen widgets as the extension of their existing apps — like what Flighty is doing to convey flight status and other travel updates to users. Others see the widgets as part of a larger set of personalization offerings, allowing users to pin their favorite photos, motivational quotes or even favorite app shortcuts to their Lock Screen, as ScreenKit has done.

For apps with real-time updates, the Live Activities feature will allow developers to display further information on the Lock Screen — like when a customer’s pizza is arriving or when their Lyft is nearby, for example.

But what really blew us away was when Apple surprised everyone with an extension of Live Activities that hadn’t yet been leaked: the new Dynamic Island feature. Frankly, it was exciting to learn about a new feature for the first time during the keynote, instead of reading about it in the news — something that’s become a much more common occurrence these days.

A smart combination of hardware and software, the Dynamic Island turns the dreaded sensor “notch” at the top of the device — now more compact in the latest iPhone models — into a feature. The pill-shaped cutout introduces a unique way to interact with activities, alerts and notifications, said Apple, underselling it a bit.

This adaptive area can expand, contract and morph into different shapes and sizes as it delivers information to the end user through animations and transitions — taking advantage of the black space required by the notch, rather than trying to hide it.

You can imagine keeping an eye on your Uber while you text a friend, watching a timer while you read the next steps in a recipe or getting turn-by-turn directions while in another app, among other things. It also works to deliver informational updates in a visually engaging way without interrupting what you’re already doing on your phone. This could include things like confirming your AirPods are connected, muting, starting a charge, starting a FaceID, confirming your transit card was activated when tapping your iPhone in transit locations and more, Apple suggested.

And it can show other background activity, like the music you’re playing when you exit the music app — it even includes a tiny photo of the album art. When you want to access the “now playing” controls again, you can then tap the Dynamic Island to see it expand into a larger, interactive floating widget of sorts with more options. (Will the selfie camera get dirty, we wonder?)

The same goes for phone calls, where a tap can bring up a larger interface for tapping the mute button, speaker button, FaceTime option, the “end call” button and more.

Needless to say, developers and designers were enthralled by the possibilities, praising the feature on Twitter during and after Apple’s event. It’s fair to say we’ll likely see adoption of this feature in the months ahead, when the technology becomes available.

Weekly News

Platforms: Google

Image Credits: Google

• Not to be upstaged by Apple, Google this week announced it will host an in-person Pixel hardware event on October 6 at 10 a.m. ET in Brooklyn, where the company is planning to introduce the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel Watch.
• Android 13 got its first patch, which addresses some issues around wireless charging and battery drains.
• Google rolled out a broader Android update that includes an upgrade to its AirDrop-like “Nearby Share” feature that now has a “self-share” mode for moving files between your own devices. Other updates include redesigned widgets, sound alerts, audio descriptions for Google TV and live-sharing on Google Meet.

Image Credits: Google

• Google also touted how Android 13 will make it easier to keep users’ personal data and work data separated thanks to the OS’s new “work profiles,” which let users indicate how apps should be used. This option lets users have separate photo galleries for personal and work use, and can help keep their YouTube watch history separate when used for work or personal use, among other things.
• Shortly after news came out that Google was blocking Trump’s Truth Social app from Google Play, the company reversed another controversial decision by allowing the conservative-leaning Parler app back in, over a year after its removal following the January 6 violence. Justifying its decision, Google said Parler had implemented the necessary moderation controls required by user-generated apps.

E-commerce

• Instagram is preparing to test a version of its app that reduces its focus on shopping, according to The Information. The app will try removing the Instagram Shopping page as part of this test. The company says the new version, known as Tab Lite, will be tested over the next few months to see how it fares.

Augmented Reality

Image Credits: Snap

• Snap is powering several custom-built AR experiences for the Vogue World Event at New York’s Fashion Week. The event on Monday, September 12, will feature a “Skywalk” Lens that transforms the show with AR as blossoming flowers emerge as models walk the runway. Other Lenses bring sunlight or moonlight to users’ faces. The Lenses were built by Arcadia, Snap’s creative studio for AR.
• A new Wonderlab AR app, powered by Niantic’s Lightship ARDK, allows people in the U.K. to discover the science behind ordinary objects using AR and geospatial technologies.

Fintech

• In a crackdown on unethical lenders, India said its central bank will prepare a whitelist of legal loan apps and the IT ministry plans to ensure that only approved apps are hosted on app stores.
• Trading app Robinhood launched an Investor Index that will be updated monthly to track the performance of the 100 most popular stocks on its platform by weighting its users’ “conviction.”
• London-based finance app Revolut launched a one-click payments feature to rival PayPal. The feature, Revolut Pay, will work with retailers like Shopify, Prestashop, WH Smith Plc, and Funky Pigeon to start.

Adtech

• One year later, Apple’s privacy changes with ATT have helped to boost its own ads business, a new report found. According to a review by the performance insights platform InMobi’s Appsumer, Apple’s Search Ads business has now joined the Facebook-Google advertising duopoly after growing its adoption by 4 percentage points to reach 94.8% year-over-year, while Facebook’s adoption dropped 3% to 82.8%. In addition to the growing advertiser adoption of Apple’s Search Ads, the report also found Apple’s business grew its share-of-wallet by 5 percentage points, to reach a 15% share, while Facebook’s share-of-wallet dropped 4 percentage points, to 28%, from Q1 2021 through Q2 2022.

Social

Image Credits: Twitter

• Ahead of the U.S. midterms, Twitter said it would begin to add 1,000 contributors per week to its crowdsourced fact-checking tool, Birdwatch, which had been previously tested with 15,000 contributors. The tool will now require users to earn their way to contributor status by rating notes as helpful or not, and earning points based on those ratings’ accuracy.
• Twitter says its new “edit tweet” feature, now in testing, will allow users to edit their tweets up to five times during the first 30 minutes it’s live. This functionality seems to be designed to better cater to marketers or other attention-getters, who want to find the right combination of words or hashtags, rather than helping everyday users who want to fix a typo — a feature already addressed by Twitter Blue’s “Undo Tweet” option.
• Twitter is also now testing a new way to share tweets in India by adding a WhatsApp button under the posts for Android users.
• Instagram confirmed it’s planning to test a feature that will allow users to repost others’ Feed posts — its alternative to something like Twitter’s Retweet. The feature would be a way for aggregator accounts to better credit others’ work, instead of just stealing it.
• Instagram removed Pornhub’s account for undisclosed reasons. Though the site offers adult material, its social media account only shared nonpornographic images and videos. The move follows a lawsuit where Pornhub parent MindGeek is being sued for allegedly distributed child sexual abuse material on its platform.
• Nextdoor announced it would again partner with Vote.org to help increase voter turnout for U.S. midterms by encouraging its users to verify their voter registration, find their polling place and more.

Dating

• Match Group and its flagship app Tinder announced their advocacy for the passage of the “Respect for Marriage Act,” federation legislation that protects the rights to same-sex and interracial marriage. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the legislation in July with bipartisan support and now Match Group and Tinder are asking the Senate to do the same. The Act arrives at a critical time, given the threat to people’s rights posed by the current Supreme Court.

Messaging

• Signal appointed a former Google manager and Big Tech critic, Meredith Whittaker, as its first president. The new exec will help to determine Signal’s policy and stragey, including its communications policy.
• In case there was any question about Apple’s position on adopting RCS, CEO Tim Cook put that to rest by telling an audience member who asked a question about this during a tech conference that he should just “buy your mom an iPhone” if she wanted to see clear videos.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Disney+

• Disney+ released its first AR-enabled short film, ‘Remembering,’ starring Brie Larson. The film uses ShazamKit to listen for an audio cue that will alert users when to launch the AR experience during the film, which focuses on exploring a child’s imagination. When launched, the AR companion app will display a waterfall spilling off the TV and other effects to augment the film’s storytelling.
• Triller is facing a third lawsuit, this time from a company called Phiture, which offers consulting services to mobile app developers, over non-payment. The company has already been sued by Sony Music for nonpayment and by creators Timbaland and Swizz Beatz, who say they are owed $28 million for selling Verzuz to the company.
• Spotify’s CFO Paul Vogel said the music streaming platform will begin testing and trialing audiobooks “very soon.” The company last fall had acquired audiobook distributor Findaway to enter this market, allowing it to compete with Amazon and Apple.
• The Tencent-backed Indian music streaming app Gaana switched to a paid subscription biz model after failing to find an exit or close on new funding, Reuters reported.

Gaming

• Google is launching a one-year pilot in India that will allow daily fantasy sports apps and rummy games but will bar the use of Google’s billing for IAPs. The pilot begins on September 28.
• Roblox is testing in-game dynamic billboards with the launch of its new ad platform. It’s also launching new age guidelines to restrict some games to users over the age of 13. The company also said it’s adding $10 million more to its Game Fund to support game creators, where each project gets a minimum of $500,000.

Health & Fitness

• Apple confirmed it will bring its Apple Fitness+ subscription to all iPhone users regardless of whether they own an Apple Watch, as promised earlier this year at WWDC. The service will arrive in all 21 countries where Fitness+ is offered and will ship alongside the iOS 16 update on Monday, including some new workouts.

Utilities

• Google Maps expanded its fuel-efficient and eco-friendly routing options to 40 more countries across Europe. The feature was first introduced to the U.S. in 2021, allowing users to plan their drive by how much gas they’d need to expend over other factors.
• The Compass app will be updated with the release of watchOS 9, Apple said during its keynote this week, where it also unveiled the rugged Apple Watch Ultra. The refreshed app will surface more in-depth information and include three distinct views. A new hybrid view will simultaneously show an analog compass dial and a digital view. Turning the Digital Crown will reveal an additional view that includes latitude, longitude, elevation and incline, as well as an orienteering view showing Compass Waypoints and Backtrack (a feature powered by GPS data to show where the user has been), noted Apple’s press release.

Government & Policy

• EU privacy regulators are fining Instagram €405 million as a result of a complaint over how the social media app handles children’s data in violation of the GDPR. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) found Instagram, at the time of the complaint, would set accounts of child users to the public by default, among other violations, including the publication of kids’ emails and phone numbers. This fine is the second-highest fine under the GDPR, and DPC’s third for the company.

Security & Privacy

• Thanks to a Google Play Services update, Android will now alert users if data breaches had compromised any of their passwords.

Funding and M&A

LA-based Remento, an app that focuses on capturing and preserving family stories, raised $3 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures. The app launched this week on iOS after a year of beta testing.

Grocery delivery app Instacart announced its acquisition of the e-commerce platform Rosie, which helps local and independent retailers and wholesalers and provides them with tools for powering order flow, fulfillment and customer insights. Deal terms were not disclosed but Ithaca, New York-based Rosie had raised $11.9 million to date.

Latana, a platform that bids on mobile ad space, raised €36 million (~$35.79 million) in Series B funding — €10 million (~$9.94 million) of which was debt — led by Oxx.

Subscription-based Android fintech app Stack raised $2.7 million from Madrona, The Venture Collective, Santa Clara Ventures and others. The app aims to offer crypto education and trading for teens and their parents.

Headspace Health acquired Shine, a mental health and wellness app dedicated to providing an inclusive mental health experience for the BIPOC community. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.

Downloads

LineupSupply

If you often find yourself making Spotify playlists to get hyped for an upcoming music festival or to relive a favorite past show, a new mobile app called LineupSupply can now help make that process easier. This clever new utility allows you to upload a photo of a music festival’s poster to have it automatically transformed into a Spotify playlist in a matter of moments. Alternately, you can use the app to find playlists created by others or, with a one-time purchase of $1.99, tap into music recommendations based on the artists in the images you uploaded.

LineupSupply also lets you customize the playlist before its creation by removing artists you don’t want to be included in your playlist. And if you don’t want to do the work of finding and uploading your own image, you may be able to find an existing playlist built by other users in the app’s “Discover” section.

There’s no limit to the number of playlists you can create with the free version. But with a one-time upgrade of $1.99, you can gain access to a few additional features, including the ability to set a custom app icon or further customize the playlist by controlling the number of songs per artist, the song sorting options, and the playlist description.

This Week in Apps: Apple’s event brings a ‘dynamic Island,’ new widgets and iOS 16 by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Google and Solo.io today announced the next evolution of the Istio service mesh. Dubbed the “Ambient Mesh,” this new framework does away with Istio’s sidecar-centric architecture and replaces it with a sidecar-less approach that promises to improve the service’s security posture and make it easier for new users to adopt the technology by reducing the resources needed to run it.

Service meshes are a critical piece of infrastructure for a lot of companies that aim to be (or become) cloud native. With hundreds or more microservices, all running in a variable number of containers, businesses need a way to track what’s running in their networks and ensure connectivity between all of these services. A simple IP address doesn’t cut it when you’re constantly spinning containers up and down, after all. There are a number of competing service mesh projects, but Istio, which Google recently donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), has become somewhat of a standard.

The new Ambient Mesh will be an optional feature, but in a joint interview before today’s announcement, both Google principle engineer Lous Ryan and Solo.io CEO and founder Idit Levine noted that they expect a lot of new users to opt for the Ambient Mesh approach.

“In a lot of environments, everybody is using [Istio] at crazy scale. But we wanted to figure out how to improve adoption,” Levine said. “What we learned from our customers is that we want to make the operational side of Istio better. It’s not bad right now, but we want to make it even better. We want to make sure that performance will get even better and we want to improve anything related to cost.”

Both Google and Solo started their own projects to address some of these issues but soon realized that they were both working toward the same goal and decided to combine their resources. Ryan stressed that Google had put a lot of emphasis on the security aspects of this new solution when it started working on this project.

“We’re very deliberate about what we do. We don’t make wild claims unless we can back them up — and in particular, Google is extremely security-conscious,” he said. “A big part of what services mesh is trying to do is solve security problems for people. We saw this operational friction that we wanted to help customers with. We also wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose any of the security properties of the system when we did.”

He noted that Solo brought a lot of the operational perspective to this project as the two teams worked together to develop this new framework.

Both Levine and Ryan stressed that this is an evolutionary step for Istio. The current way the system works won’t change — at least for the foreseeable future. Users can even mix and match the current sidecar approach with the sidecar-less Ambient Mesh if that’s what they want to do.

“We’ve done a lot of internal evaluations about security, but we want to let the community work through this and get feedback,” Ryan noted. “If people are comfortable with the existing security model and sidecars, they need time to get comfortable with a different — or slightly different — security posture. It’s my belief that the security posture of Ambient is at least as good as sidecar, if not better, but the community is going to need time to wrap its head around it and give us feedback and for us to react.”

Solo’s Levine meanwhile stressed that her team focused on the operational aspects of this new approach, from installing the mesh to updating it and the day-to-day operations of it. She noted that when Solo showed its new approach to customers, most wanted to start using it right away. “They were: ‘oh my god.’ And that was in terms of the operations and everything related to usability. How you install the mesh, upgrade the mesh — for that, Ambient is amazing. It’s really what we wanted to build — a service mesh that’s transparent to the application. You can apply resources, you can delete the mesh — the application doesn’t even know that it’s there. And I think that’s a big point for Ambient.”

When a platform owner now installs Ambient into a cluster, the existing applications just keep on running. As Ryan noted, you then tell the system that you want a given application to be part of the mesh and that’s it. There are no restarts and, of course, no need to inject any sidecars. And if there’s an update to Istio, the applications don’t even notice.

“The biggest enemy of service mesh adoption has always been complexity,” said Joe Searcy, a member of the technical staff at T-Mobile. “The resource and operational overhead to manage service mesh for a large enterprise has continued to make service mesh adoption cumbersome even as projects like Istio have worked to decrease complexity. The opportunities that Ambient Mesh provides are extremely exciting. With better transparency to applications, fewer moving parts, simpler invocation, and huge potential in savings of compute resources and engineering hours…all I can say is: Sign me up!“

Ambient Mesh is now available as a beta to Solo customers and will become generally available once the company launches its Gloo Mesh 2.1. And, of course, it’s also part of the Istio open source project.

Google and Solo.io bring Ambient Mesh to Istio by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

GPS in its many regional flavors has become a ubiquitous feature in phones, smart watches, cars and other connected devices, but for all the location-based features that it helps enable (mapping being the most obvious) it has a lot of shortcomings: it can be slow and inaccurate, it can contribute to faster battery drain, and as people are discovering, it can be manipulated or exploited in unintended and alarming ways.

Today, a UK startup called FocalPoint that’s building software to improve GPS’s operations, accuracy and security is announcing a round of funding to continue building out its tech — which today works up to 4G and will in future also work with 5G and WiFi — and to roll out the first commercial deployments of its system with early customers. Use cases for the tech include more accurate location for smartphone apps for navigation or location tracking (for example for running and other sports); to help companies with their navigation services (for example for transportation or fleet management); and for better GPS security overall.

Based in Cambridge and founded as a spinout from Cambridge University, FocalPoint has raised £15 million ($17 million), part of a Series C round that it expects to total £23 million ($26 million) when fully completed. Molten Ventures (FKA Draper Esprit) — which led a £6 million Series B in 2021– and Gresham House are the two investors in so far. Ramsey Faragher, the CTO and founder, said that the other investors, which include a major U.S. automotive brand that is a strategic investor, will be closing in the coming weeks.

FocalPoint about a year ago had another notable business development that is helping put the startup on potential customers’ radar: last September, it appointed Scott Pomerantz as its CEO. Described as a “living legend in GPS” Pomerantz previously founded Global Locate, one of the first companies to bring GPS to the mass market, with its tech used by Apple and others. That startup eventually got acquired by Broadcom.

Speaking of Apple, FocalPoint’s focus on better GPS is coming at a timely moment. Just yesterday, the iPhone giant announced its newest Apple Watch models, featuring much more accurate GPS using a multi band approach on devices touting newly extended battery life. It is a signal of the priority that device makers are putting on improving GPS, and investments that they would be willing to make to do so, and thus the opportunity for startups offering new and more effective approaches to crack the market.

As Faragher explained to TC, GPS development to date has largely been based around chipsets embedded in the devices using it, which has meant that improving services by and large have depended on new versions of that hardware. That’s a big hill to climb, however, when considering the embedded market of legacy chips and the process of rolling out next-generation hardware: There were 1.8 billion GPS chipsets shipped as of 2019, with the total projected to grow to 2.8 billion by 2029. Smartphones account for the bulk of those numbers, but autonomy, road and drone devices are growing the fastest.

Along with that, GPS relies on using one or another of two radio bands; typically one produces better positioning than the other but it does so at a cost of draining battery life in the process.

FocalPoint is working on a software-based solution, Faragher said, which he said means that the chipsets themselves do not necessarily need to be swapped out or upgraded to implement its faster approach.

It’s working on algorithms, he said, which are aimed at understanding the directions of satellite signals, using this to gain better understanding of exact location of a device — a process that not only improves the accuracy of a location, but helps to identify when a signal is potentially getting spoofed to appear in one place when it’s actually somewhere else. This is carried out using the band that is less battery-intensive, which previously had been deemed to have poorer positioning performance. “The higher performing signal has always been more computationally intensive,” he said, which is why it impacts batter life. “We can make the lower quality, lower-battery-intensive signal better.”

There are other approaches aiming for the same outcome, but Faragher said they have been too costly and clunky.

“Only military antennas have been able to detect movement like this before,” he said, with those antennas coming in the form, of satellite dishes that are the size of a dinner plate and cost around $10,000 each — a big expense when hundreds need to be used across a wider mobile network. “What we are offering is a military-grade feature for the cost of software upgrade,” he said. “We synthesize expensive antennae.” this could help reduce the cost of other components and this resonates. End expense off a component
There are two different frequencies used by satellites, more computationally intensive for the higher performing signal. So we can make the lower quality battery use signal better than then more expensive signal.

Companies that have worked with FocalPoint to test how its software works are a key to where the company is aiming its business: the startup partnered with Google and its Android team to test how its software could improve location of users for its mapping software in a trial that the two companies ran in London.

“We demonstrated to Google that before using our technology, it couldn’t use the lower quality GPS band for its in-house mapping technology,” he said. That in-house tech is what Google would use for any navigation service, including for Google Maps as well as its devices. He said that Google’s approach, which looks at how signals bounce off buildings to figure out location, is useful with the higher GPS signal but not the lower one, therefore being a stronger drain on battery life. “We could make that lower band work.”

Faragher would not comment on whether it was working with Google, or any other specific companies, during the interview.

“Existing GPS technologies are no longer fit for purpose and we’re proud to continue our support for FocalPoint in its mission to revolutionise the accuracy of GPS and other global navigation satellite systems and in doing so, solve the issues faced by business and consumers with imprecise and unsafe receivers,” said David Cummings, a venture partner with Molten Ventures, in a statement. “We’ve been impressed with how the team has continued to build and expand since its Series B funding round last year, and are thrilled to support FocalPoint in this next exciting chapter for the company”.

UK’s FocalPoint raises $17M for its software-based approach to repairing the flaws of GPS by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

For any journalist who has ever googled their name, there is a good chance that one of the hits will be for Muck Rack, a database that trawls social media, online publications, and other expanses of the internet to compile lists of people, what they cover and where, a tool used by public relations pros, marketers, and others who want to find and connect with them. Today, Muck Rack is making another kind of connection, with investors: it’s raised $180 million in what it’s describing as its first outside funding, having been bootstrapped since being founded back in 2009.

The money is coming from a single, big-name investor, Susquehanna Growth Equity, which is taking a minority stake in the company as a result. Founders Gregory Galant (the CEO) and Lee Semel (the CTO) will continue to control the company post the deal.

The company, based out of Miami, also provides a range of other tools for the media professional — including media monitoring, reporting and analytics and collaboration and pitching tools that it introduced in 2011, after running for two years solely as a journalist database — and as such is more generally part of the world of business intelligence, specifically in the media category, and as such competes with the likes of Cision, Meltwater, Brandwatch and perhaps to some extent more targeted services like TechMeme. All of these face an interesting crossroads in terms of what they do.

On the one hand, the face of “media” and who and what gets attention has changed drastically in the last decade: a lot of traditional publications (outlets) have disappeared or morphed to keep up with the times. The times, meanwhile, have introduced a new layer of communication in the form of social media, which sits alongside, or often above, that of publications when it comes to mass communication and how people learn news, or about new products, or whatever it is that is being broadcast.

Social media has a viral element to it that’s completely different from traditional media, and those creating content on there are different, too. Sometimes, they are still journalists. Often, they are not.

The big question for a company like Muck Rack — or its competitors for that matter — is how they will evolve with the times to reflect that mass communications landscape. The secondary question is what the value is in what it does today.

At least one answer is coming in the form of today’s news and this very hefty funding round. Landing in a period where VCs have been tightening their purse strings, it speaks to how strongly Muck Rack has performed until now and the confidence investors have in it sustaining that ahead.

“We’re thrilled to partner with SGE to support our rapid growth and continue to define the role of PRM in the SaaS ecosystem,” said Gregory Galant, co-founder and CEO of Muck Rack, in a statement. “This investment is an indicator of the strength of our business and Muck Rack’s bright future as we drive toward our mission to enable organizations to build trust, tell their stories and demonstrate the unique value of earned media.”

The company says that revenues grew 75% in 2021, and between 2018 and 2021, it grew sales 300%, impressive numbers for a company that is more than a decade old, and has been bootstrapped. Customers who are using Muck Rack’s database include Google, International Rescue Committee, Pfizer, Golin, Zapier and Duolingo, it said.

The Covid-19 effect seems to have been a double one: not only did it drive more would-be Muck Rack customers to seeing out more cloud-based tools to do their jobs more efficiently, but it impacted how Muck Rack itself is run. Staff numbers 200 and it’s been working as a “distributed” business since 2021, the company said. (Muck Rack was founded in NYC, but the dateline on its announcement is Miami, speaking to how the company itself has taken the moment to seek out locations that are more amenable to work life balance, something that became a huge theme during the pandemic.)

And it has traction with its targets: more than 10,000 journalists asked to be added to the database when it first launched, although from my personal experience it seems that it’s also pretty adept at adding journalists without them asking to be added.

“Every PR professional should be using Muck Rack,” said Josh Elser, managing director at SGE, in a statement “The Company has established itself as one of the most innovative software platforms to meet the shifting demands of the communications industry. We believe there is tremendous opportunity for Muck Rack to be the dominant global PR platform, and we look forward to working closely with Greg, Lee and their team to support this next phase of company expansion.” Elser and Scott Feldman of SGE will be joining the board.

Muck Rack, the journalist database, raises $180M in its first outside funding by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch