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.

The app industry continues to grow, with 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, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion.

Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games generated over $100 million in consumer spend and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend and just eight apps topped $1 billion.

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 suggestions about new apps to try, too.

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Top Stories

Instagram to verify users’ ages in new test

Image Credits: Instagram

Instagram announced this week it’s testing a new set of features for verifying users’ ages in the app, including things like video selfies, vouching from adult friends and providing an ID. The tests, which will begin in the U.S., will apply to users who try to change their age to 18 or over after being previously set to under 18. These users may be trying to correct an earlier mistake or they could be teens trying to circumvent the app’s newer age-appropriate restrictions.

If users are prompted to provide an ID card, like a passport or driver’s license, Meta will store it on its servers for 30 days before deletion. If users choose the social vouching option, they’ll need at least three other adult friends to vouch for their age — and Instagram will choose a list of six people randomly who meet the criteria. Those users can’t have a new account or be vouching for others at the same time.

The company also said it’s using AI that can estimate users’ ages in video selfies. The company is working with the London-based digital identify firm Yoti which will examine the file, make an estimate, then delete the file.

Age verification is an increasingly common feature in social apps used by younger users as a result of tighter regulations. Another company catering to Gen Z users, Yubo, recently rolled out its own age estimating tech as well.

Twitter goes long form

TechCrunch broke the news that Twitter was testing a long-form writing feature called Twitter Notes. The next day after our report went live, Twitter announced it officially.

The news is one of Twitter’s more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters, as it will allow users to write on Twitter directly, as if it’s a blogging platform. With Twitter Notes, users are able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing. The company also said it would merge its newsletter service, Revue, into Twitter Notes.

Users with access can create Twitter Notes from the “Write” link in Twitter’s navigation. For the time being, Twitter is testing Notes with a small group of writers in the United States, Canada, Ghana and the United Kingdom. The Notes can be up to 2,500 words in length.

The feature could encourage users to rely on Twitter Thread (tweetstorms) less in order to share their longer thoughts, ideas or stories with their Twitter followers, Community or Circle. It could also put an end to using a screenshot from the Notes app to tweet something longer than 280 characters. Meanwhile, Twitter Notes can tap into the potential for viral distribution that comes with posting to the platform. Like tweets, the Notes would have their own link and could be tweeted, retweeted, sent in DMs, liked and bookmarked. They can also be reported and must comply with Twitter’s rules.

It’s worth noting (ha!) that Twitter Notes also gives the company a new business and potential revenue stream as it further develops the product. The feature may allow the social platform to compete with established services, like Medium for blogging, or Substack’s newsletters.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple released the second developer beta for iOS 16 and iPadOS 16, along with other betas for Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Among the changes is support for cellular iCloud backups over LTE; a new feature that shows a brand or company’s logo beside their email in the Mail app to cut down on phishing; tech that lets you skip CAPTCHAs; plus new SMS filters and the ability to tap to report a junk SMS sender in the U.S. But another thing to note if you’re testing iOS 16 — the current beta’s editable iMessage feature doesn’t work with older iPhones, meaning your edits are texted to the person after the original message.
• Apple also rolled out Xcode 14 beta 2 which now includes a Stage Manager simulator.
• The iPad will no longer work as a home hub in iOS 16 according to information discovered in the Home app.

E-commerce

Image Credits: Twitter/Shopify

• As part of its ongoing efforts to expand into e-commerce, Twitter announced a new partnership with Shopify. The deal will see Twitter launching a sales channel app that will be made available to all of Shopify’s U.S. merchants through its app store. The app allows merchants to onboard themselves to Twitter’s Shopping Manager, the dashboard offered by the social media company where sellers can access product catalog tools and enable other shopping features for their profiles. Merchants will be able to use the new sales channel app to connect their Twitter account to their Shopify admin then get set up with Twitter’s Shopping Manager and other free tools Twitter built for “Professionals.” This includes Twitter’s launch of a new feature called Location Spotlight, which allows local businesses in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia to display information like their street address, contact info and operating hours directly on their profile.

Augmented Reality

• Walmart gave its app an AR upgrade with the launch of View in Your Space, which allows customers to see home décor and furniture in their own homes. The feature will be rolled out to over 300 items on Walmart’s iOS app by early July.
• Tim Cook may have hinted at Apple’s AR headset plans when he told a Chinese state-run news outlet to “stay tuned” to see what Apple had in store next for AR in an interview. A later investor note by Ming-Chi Kuo also suggested the new hardware could arrive as soon as early 2023.
• IKEA launched a new in-app design experience, called IKEA Kreativ, that lets U.S. shoppers visualize furniture in their own spaces using AR and AI. The feature can also remove the existing furniture from your room so you can better imagine the changes.
• Snap shared some data about AR shopping trends, noting that there was a 32% increased use of shoppable AR during the pandemic and that 69% of consumers believed AR was a part of shopping’s future.

Fintech

• Coinbase is shutting down its standalone Pro service by year’s end and replacing it with Advanced Trade across its website and app. The latter offers comparable features to the Pro service, which had lowered fees to traders who interacted directly with the Coinbase Exchange order book.
• Facebook Pay formally rebranded to Meta Pay. The change had already been announced but is now rolling out in the U.S. before expanding globally.

Social

Image Credits: Twitter

• Snapchat announced its first accelerator program for emerging Black creators, which will see 25 selected participants receive $10,000 per month to launch their careers across a total $3 million investment.
• Instagram has been experimenting with a new feature that would allow users to leave notes for their friends at the top of the DM inbox. The feature could help users share urgent or more important messages that could be overlooked in Stories or in messages.
• Meta announced more ways for creators to make money on Facebook and Instagram and the expansion of other monetization tools to more creators. The company will keep paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges and its upcoming independent news products free for creators until 2024, instead of 2023, as it had said before. Meta is also testing a designated place on Instagram where creators can get discovered by brands for partnerships; will launch a way for users to subscribe to Facebook Groups even for those who have paid for access on another platform; and is expanding the Reels Play Bonus program to more creators and making Facebook Stars available to all.
• Twitter announced the return of its developer conference, Chirp. The event was first held in 2010 but was then canceled the next year. At the time, the event had been a reflection of Twitter’s attitude toward its developer community in general — disorganized and constantly in flux as the company’s business initiatives changed. Times have since changed and Twitter has been trying to woo back developers with its new API, even by promoting some apps on Twitter itself.

Messaging

• Telegram said it now has over 700 monthly active users and announced Telegram Premium, a subscription that gives users access to exclusive features like doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management and more.

Photos

• Camera+, an alternative to Apple’s built-in app, added a new “UltraRes upscaling” feature. With machine learning technology, the app can upscale images to up to four times what the native sensor can capture.

Dating

• Match-owned Hinge added a new feature that allows users to share their “Dating Intentions” — meaning whether they’re looking for long-term, short-term, open relationships and more. The update changes Hinge’s focus as the company has historically been the app designed to connect people looking for more serious relationships, while Match-owned Tinder was aimed at those seeking casual encounters.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Spotify

• Spotify revamped its concert discovery feature with the launch of a new Live Events Feed. The personalized feature will allow users to find favorite artists’ events in your area and will now include artist imagery and more tour details. Local events will also be highlighted while streaming and soon, in other places in the Spotify app.
• Clubhouse is testing a new feature called Houses, per Bloomberg, which are private rooms aimed at encouraging social interactions where anyone can unmute themselves and speak.
• Reddit Talk, the company’s live audio Clubhouse-like feature, announced its Host program would launch on July 11th. The program will promote hosts’ audio across the site. Reddit Talk also gained new features like a soundboard and topic selector for discovery purposes.
• Apple Music raised the price of its student plan in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. In the United States and Canada, the price for the plan has increased from $4.99 to $5.99. In the United Kingdom, the price has increased from £4.99 to £5.99.

Gaming

• Epic Games has come up with a new system for game ratings. While these changes apply to its own online games store, it’s an example of why alternative app stores could be useful to provide competition with Apple’s own — they can be a ground to test out new ideas. In Epic’s case, random players who have played a game for over two hours will be asked to rate the game on a five-point scale. Over time, these will create the game’s Overall Rating. The system, which relies on random sampling, could cut down on review bombing and reviews left by those who aren’t actual players, the company notes.
• China’s regulation of the mobile gaming market may be leading to declining use of the App Store in the country, according to Morgan Stanley. The firm’s latest analysis estimated that the App Store only saw 1% growth in June so far, compared with 6% growth in May.

Health & Fitness

• Fitbit added a new premium feature, “Sleep Profile,” which will allow users to track their sleep patterns across 10 key metrics, including new data points like bedtime consistency, the time before sound sleep and disrupted sleep. The feature is rolling out to the Fitbit app’s Premium users and supports devices including Sense, Versa 3, Versa 2, Charge 5, Luxe or Inspire 2.

Travel & Transportation

• Apple is planning to expand its CarPlay experience to China, according to a job posting.
• Polestar has now added Apple CarPlay to its all-electric Polestar 2 sedan via an over-the-air software update, after previously only supporting Android Auto.
• Car rental apps saw their MAUs grow 19% year-over-year in the U.S. in May, reported Apptopia, despite rising gas prices.

Image Credits: Apptopia

Government & Policy

• TikTok offered a series of commitments in the EU to improve user reporting and disclosure requirements around ads/sponsored content as well as an agreement to boost transparency around its digital coins and virtual gifts. The agreement follows a series of complaints over child safety and consumer protection complaints filed back in February 2021.
• The U.S. Department of Justice today entered into an agreement with Meta to resolve a lawsuit that alleged Meta engaged in discriminatory advertising in violation of the Fair Housing Act (FHA). As a result, Meta has agreed to develop a new system for housing ads and will pay a roughly $115,000 penalty, the maximum under the FHA.

Reading & News

• India-based VerSe Innovation rolled out its news aggregator Dailyhunt in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, with over 5,000 content partners in the region.

Security & Privacy

• Google Chrome for iOS gained a number of new features in a recent update, including access to Enhanced Safe Browsing to protect users from dangerous websites and malware, as well as the ability to make Google Password Manager your Autofill provider. Other additions include Chrome Actions (typed commands in the URL bar) and access to Google’s Discover feed on the main page.
• Daycare apps including those from Brightwheel, HiMama and others were found to lack 2FA and other privacy protections, in an analysis.
• Google threat researchers detailed a commercial spyware system called Hermit, used in Kazakhstan and Italy, which targeted both Android and iOS. The iOS version had six exploits, including two zero-days. Targeted victims are tricked into installing a malicious app — which masquerades as a legitimate branded telco or messaging app — from outside the app store.

Funding and M&A

Courier raised $35 million in a Series B funding round led by GV. The company provides an API for sending notifications across multiple channels, including email, text, web and mobile.

Ghana-based fintech Fido raised $30 million in equity investment and some undisclosed debt funding in a Series A round led by Israel-based private equity fund Fortissimo Capital. The round brings the total equity investment raised to date to $38 million. The startup says it’s adding savings and payment products to its portfolio later this year and will enter Uganda.

Twitter asked its shareholders to approve the $44 billion Elon Musk acquisition. At the time of its SEC filing, Twitter’s share price was around $38.12 — lower than Musk’s offer price of $54.20 a share. The company’s market cap had also dropped below $30 billion, making a $44 billion deal look very good.

Downloads

WatchTube

Image Credits: WatchTube

Well, here’s something kind of crazy: 9to5Mac this week highlighted the new app WatchTube, which lets you watch YouTube videos directly on your Apple Watch. Yes, really!

The app is not the best experience for watching videos, as you may have guessed, but it is pretty wild that it actually works. The app by default shows you top trending videos, but you can customize this so the videos that appear are selected from a particular genre, like Music, News, Gaming, Movies and more. While it would be enough to just accomplish bringing YouTube to the Watch, the developer also added other features like the ability to search for videos, save videos to the app’s local Library and subscribe to Channels. When you get back to your other devices, you can also scan a QR code to share the video back to your iPhone or iPad.

Another strike against use of Google Analytics in Europe: The Italian data protection authority has found a local web publisher’s use of the popular analytics tool to be non-compliant with EU data protection rules owing to user data being transferred to the U.S. — a country that lacks an equivalent legal framework to protect the info from being accessed by US spooks.

The Garante found the web publisher’s use of Google Analytics resulted in the collection of many types of user data, including device IP address, browser information, OS, screen resolution, language selection, plus the date and time of the site visit, which were transferred to the U.S. without adequate supplementary measures being applied to raise the level of protection to the necessary EU legal standard.

Protections applied by Google were not sufficient to address the risk, it added, echoing the conclusion of several other EU DPAs who have also found use of Google Analytics violates the bloc’s data protection rules over the data export issue.

Italy’s DPA has given the publisher in question (a company called Caffeina Media Srl) 90 days to fix the compliance violation. But the decision has wider significance as it has also warned other local websites that are using Google Analytics to take note and check their own compliance, writing in a press release [translated from Italian with machine translation]:

“[T]he Authority draws the attention of all Italian managers of websites, public and private, to the illegality of transfers made to the United States through GA [Google Analytics], also in consideration of the numerous reports and questions that are being received by the Office, and invites all data controllers to verify the compliance of the methods of use of cookies and other tracking tools used on its websites, with particular attention to Google Analytics and other similar services, with the legislation on the protection of personal data.”

Earlier this month, France’s data protection regulator issued updated guidance warning over illegal use of Google Analytics — following a similar finding of fault with a local website’s use of the software in February.

The CNIL’s guidance suggests only very narrow possibilities for EU-based site owners to use Google’s analytics tool legally — either by applying additional encryption where keys are held under the exclusive control of the data exporter itself or other entities established in a territory offering an adequate level of protection; or by using a proxy server to avoid direct contact between the user’s terminal and Google’s servers.

Austria’s DPA also upheld a similar complaint over a site’s use of Google Analytics in January.

While the European Parliament found itself in hot water over the same core issue at the start of the year.

All these strikes against Google Analytics link back to a series of strategic complaints filed in August 2020 by European privacy campaign group noyb — which targeted 101 websites with regional operators it had identified as sending data to the US via Google Analytics and/or Facebook Connect integrations.

The complaints followed a landmark ruling by the bloc’s top court in July 2020 — which invalidated a data transfer agreement between the EU and the US, called Privacy Shield, and made it clear that DPAs have a duty to step in and suspend data flows to third countries where they suspect EU citizens’ information of being at risk. 

The so-called ‘Schrems II’ ruling is named after noyb founder and long time European privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, who filed a complaint against Facebook’s EU-US data transfers, citing surveillance practices revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which ended up — via legal referral — in front of the CJEU. (A prior challenge by Schrems also resulted in the previous EU-US data transfer arrangement being struck down by the court in 2015.)

In a more recent development, a replacement for Privacy Shield is on the way: In March, the EU and the US announced they had reached political agreement on this.

However the legal details of the planned data transfer framework still have to be finalized — and the proposed mechanism reviewed and adopted by EU institutions — before it can be put to any use. Which means that use of US-based cloud services remains shrouded in legal risk for EU customers. 

The bloc’s lawmakers have suggested the replacement deal may be finalized by the end of this year — but there’s no simple legal patch EU users of Google Analytics can reach for in the meanwhile. 

Additionally, the gap between US surveillance law and EU privacy law continues to grow in certain regards — and it’s by no means certain the negotiated replacement will be robust enough to survive the inevitable legal challenges.

A simple legal patch for such a fundamental clash of rights and priorities looks like a high bar — failing substantial reform of existing laws (which neither side looks moved to offer).

Hence we’ve started to see software-level responses by certain US cloud giants — to provide European customers with more controls over data flows — in a bid to find a way to route around the data transfers legal risk.

Shopify made a name for itself in its early days with a platform for letting retailers keen to establish their own online shops an easy and quick way build and run those services on their own websites and apps — a quick route to “D2C” at a time when it was starting to feel as if marketplaces like Amazon’s had a stranglehold on reaching consumers. Fast forward to today, after two years of an Covid-19 e-commerce boom, digital shopping is happening on an ever-expanding range of platforms. So to address that shift, today Shopify is launching a raft of tools for customers interested in spinning up social commerce, local shopping offers with Google, cryptocurrency, B2B selling, and more — some 100 new features in all.

Being everywhere shoppers might be is a movable feast these days, and Shopify’s approach seems to be to offer a Vegas-style buffet to address that: a little bit of everything for everyone. Or as CEO and founder Tobi Lütke described it, “the infinite game” of commerce.

The fuller list is being unveiled as part of a new semi-annual product sprint that the company is launching today called Shopify Editions. To be clear, Shopify has been building products in social commerce, partnering with Google, building links with cryptocurrencies, and other developments prior to today, and some of the features that it’s bundled into today’s announcement are not even being made public for the first time. What’s notable with Editions is how Shopify is rolling up so many developments into one big push, a sign of how the platform itself is expanding. Aggregating a long tail of news gives the bigger picture more heft.

Sarah has covered one in particular being announced today, a new shopping experience on Twitter, here; we’re highlighting some of the other more notable developments below:

B2B: Shopify’s primary use case has been firmly in the space of direct-to-consumer sales, retailers who are selling to mass-market audiences. Today that is shifting with a formal opening up of a framework for retailers that sell to businesses. B2B on Shopify, as it’s calling the product, isn’t only for companies that work in wholesale, but also acknowledges a couple of significant facts in the commerce world: first, retailers with a primarily consumer audience also often sell to businesses; second, those that don’t sell B2B could expand their sales by doing so. Business customers typically buy in a different pattern to consumers, and typically require different kinds of payment methods and will also have different kinds of tax needs (in the U.K., for example, a business buyer does not pay the same sales tax as a consumer does on goods and services). The new framework will make it easier for those retailers to automate some of that, and potentially grow B2B revenue in the process.

Tokengated commerce: NFT activity and valuations have nosedived in recent months, and the big question at the moment is whether that is a consequence of people waking up and smelling the tulips, or if it’s a temporal blip resulting from from the bigger dip that cryptocurrencies are making right now — and if it’s the latter, whether one might ever effectively be disaggregated from the other. Regardless! Shopify will be there for any and all customers who might decide that they would like to dip their toes into the open seas of NFTs.

No, it’s not a partnership with OpenSea, one of the bigger NFT marketplaces, but Shopify’s own take on building their own NFT experiences. Shopify’s Tokengated commerce, it says, will s to use NFTs, although it’s not clear if Shopify will be powering the creation and management of them. It notes that it will be a way to “reward true fans and VIPs, by giving NFT holders exclusive access to products, perks, and experiences” by linking crypto wallets to Shopify online stores. Merchants will be able to activate Shopify tokengated commerce experiences online, on mobile and in physical retail, Shopify said. It will also build ways for NFTs from one shop or retailer or brand to be used in a Shopify-powered store.

Shopify on iPhone. Shopify is getting more active in physical sales — not a surprise since the crossover would represent a much larger potential market for the company than solely serving online merchants; and many merchants operate across both. In the latest move to increase transactions, Shopify is providing the ability for people to tap to pay on Shopify-powered transactions on iPhone.

This was actually rolled out, it seems, in May, although without much fanfare. The basic idea is that while a lot of other point-of-sale services have relied on extra pieces of POS hardware, Shopify’s is using Apple’s tap to pay features to make it easy for a merchant to enable in-person payments with just an iPhone, no dongle or terminal required. If something like Square opened the door to a new wave of small sellers taking card payments for the first time, this is an even lower barrier to entry, which is what makes it so interesting.

Local Shopify inventory now appearing on Google. Shopify and Google were already partnering to make products sold on Shopify-powered sites discoverable on Google searches; now this is taking on a location-specific angle. When customers who are looking for a specific product, if that product is attached to a Shopify-powered retailer or brand, shoppers will be able to see if it’s available to pick up locally in a physical store. It’s not quite clear if that store needs to be one specifically run by that retailer, or if it will work with stock availability at other stores.

Functions. Shopify has been building out a lot of tech to address the growing interest among some retailers for “headless” commerce — systems where they can customize more of the features for how a site operates and looks. Functions is Shopify’s answer for that: a way for slightly bigger retailers to build more dynamic options, such as discounts for those adding above a certain threshold to their shopping carts. The idea with Functions is that it complements Hydrogen and Oxygen, the company’s framework for headless commerce, with more technical features to populate those customized sites. The aim here is to create more options to keep larger customers from migrating to platforms that cater to companies that feel that they have otherwise owngrown Shopify. (And there are dozens of them: just google “outgrown Shopify” to see what I mean.)

The bigger picture here is that while Shopify was an early mover and was prescient in seeing the potential of providing tools to build shopping sites to more merchants, it’s now trying to take more steps to anticipate but also reflect where commerce is going, and whatever those steps might be, to win by making that experience as accessible as easy to use as possible by those who are sellers, not technologists, at hear.

“We will go wherever the world of commerce goes,” Glen Coates, VP Product, Core, told us. “We want Shopify to be a big easy button.”

Google has quietly dropped its appeal in France against an antitrust fine of half a billion euros levied against it last summer for major breaches in how it negotiated to remunerate local news publishers for displaying copyrighted content.

A major reform to European Union rules around digital copyright which was agreed back in 2019 — and transposed into French law soon afterwards — created a new right covering reuse of snippets of news content.

Google responded to the change of law in France by first seeking to evade payment by stopping displaying such snippets in products like its news aggregator. But the country’s antitrust watchdog stepped in in 2020 — suspecting that Google’s unilateral act constituted an abuse of market power and ordering it to pay publishers for the content reuse.

Google then sought to cut deals with French publishers but this quickly led to complaints over how it was negotiating — such as by withholding key info and seeking to press publishers into bundling neighbouring rights payments into licensing terms for a News Showcase product Google had devised — so Google’s actions attracted another intervention by the regulator; and, in July 2021, a $592M penalty for abusive negotiation practices.

The tech giant called the fine “disproportionate” when it filed its appeal against the Autorité de la Concurrence‘s sanction last fall.

However now it’s agreed to withdrawn the appeal. The development comes as the French competition regulator said today that it’s accepting behavioral pledges first offered by Google back in December as it sought to settle the antitrust action — which suggests that Google dropping the appeal forms a part of the full settlement that’s been announced today.

“Google undertakes to withdraw its appeal against the decision not to comply with the injunctions. The fine of 500 million euros imposed by the Autorité on July 12, 2021 therefore becomes final,” L’Autorité wrote in a press release [translated from French with machine translation].

In its own blog post about the settlement, Google doesn’t make mention of withdrawing the appeal — instead, it spins its commitments being accepted as drawing a line under a problematic chapter for its business.

“Today, the Autorité de la Concurrence accepted our commitments, which frame the way in which these negotiations [over reuse of news publishers’ content] will be conducted for the coming years,” wrote Sébastien Missoffe, managing director and VP, Google France. “An independent trustee will be appointed and will be responsible for monitoring the proper execution of the commitments. These commitments illustrate our desire to move forward and to remunerate publishers and press agencies for their neighboring rights.”

What exactly has Google agreed to? The commitments that have been accepted by the French regulator now are a beefed up version of the ones Google initially offered at the end of last year.

The regulator said Google has committed to undertake good faith negotiations with news publishers who request talks over remuneration for their content under the law — applying “transparent, objective and non-discriminatory criteria”.

This includes agreeing to pass key information to publishers in a timely fashion (e.g. the number of impressions and click-through rate of their protected content on Google Search, Google News and Google Discover; plus data relating to Google’s revenues in France); and agreeing to pass to an independent agent relevant additional info that publishers may request (a structure which looks intended to workaround concerns of Google’s confidential info being too directly shared).

The framework commits the tech giant to make a compensation proposal within three months of the start of negotiations with a publisher.

If there is disagreement the framework allows for an arbitration tribunal to determine the amount Google must pay.

Google has explicitly agreed to keep separate terms with publishers to license legally protected content — so not to seek to bundle this type of content licensing into terms of any other Google media product (such as its News Showcase vehicle), as it previously attempted.

L’Autorité also notes that Google has agreed to extend the scope of its commitments to cover publishers it had previously sought to exclude, including press agencies.

Google’s blog post talks up the number of deals it has inked with French publishers in the interim — with the tech giant writing that it has “agreements with more than 150 press publications in France”.

However, as the regulator points out, the terms of the negotiation framework it’s agreed to mean publishers are not bound to any contracts they previously inked with Google — and are instead free to renegotiate terms with the benefit of the new framework in place if they so wish (though existing contracts will apply until replaced by any new deals).

Google has also undertaken not to take what would amount to retaliatory measures against publishers — committing that negotiations do not affect the indexing, classification or presentation of protected content; and do not affect the other economic relations that may exist between Google and press publishers and press agencies, per L’Autorité.

The commitments are now made compulsory for a period of five years — with the possibility of being renewed for a further five years, under the discretion of the regulator.

An approved independent agent will monitor Google’s application and oversee its negotiations with publishers. This (as yet unnamed) agent will have an active role in settling potential disputes by issuing opinions and proposals to the L’Autorité — which Google has agreed to be bound by (although publishers remain free to pursue alternative legal means to settle disputes if they wish).

Commenting in a statement, Benoît Cœuré, president of L’Autorité, said the regulator welcomes — “on the merits” — the commitments made by Google following its intervention and sanction, adding: 

“The combination of these different means of action now makes it possible to create an environment offering greater stability and guarantees of fairness for publishers and press agencies. For the first time in Europe, the commitments made by Google provide a dynamic framework for negotiation and sharing of the information necessary for a transparent assessment of the remuneration of direct and indirect related rights. This framework will improve evaluation methods and facilitate the transmission by Google of the information necessary for them.”

The news reuse issue doesn’t only apply to Google’s French operations; the EU copyright reform will apply across the bloc once all Member States have transposed the regulation into national law — hence the framework agreed in France is likely to form a template for other negotiations with regional news publishers. (Per Google’s blog, the company has inked agreements with over 650 publications so far — albeit, it may face having to redo terms based on what it’s agreed to in France if publishers elsewhere decide they want a better deal.)

Beyond the EU, Google’s licensing negotiations with publishers in Australian are also regulated after the country passed its own news code bargaining law early last year.

While the UK also appears to be considering similar legislation to support publishers as it works on a reboot of domestic competition rules wrapping tech giants. Although there’s no near term prospect of a change after the government delayed bringing legislation forward.

However the UK’s competition watchdog has said it will make full use of its existing powers in the meanwhile — which, in recent years, has included obtaining a set of commitments from Google over how it will remove support for tracking cookies in Chrome and install alternative adtech.

Germany’s competition watchdog, meanwhile, has been investigating Google’s News Showcase licensing product since last summer — following complaints over a planned integration into Google’s general search function look likely to be self-preferencing and/or unfairly disadvantage competing services offered by third parties.

That German FCO probe remains ongoing. But in January Google offered to limit how the News Showcase ‘story panels’ would appear in search results in the market — shortly after the country’s competition watchdog determined it can apply special abuse controls to Google.

The short story of all these antitrust interventions is that Big Tech’s T&Cs are gradually being reshaped by forces outside their control. And — notably — it’s international regulators doing the running at the vanguard of this enforced reboot.

Germany’s competition regulator is looking into possible abuses related to how Google operates its Maps product.

It’s the latest proceeding the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has opened against Google — with earlier (ongoing) investigations into the tech giant’s News Showcase licensing practices and its data terms. However the Maps proceeding is the first initiated under tougher abuse controls which have applied to Google’s business in Germany since January — when the regulator determined it meets the threshold for an ex ante  competition law reform that’s targeted at digital giants with “paramount significance for competition across markets”.

The determination lowers the bar for regulatory intervention to address potential competition concerns. So, in practice, it means Google may face more FCO proceedings — which are opened and could be concluded more swiftly — than if the special abuse controls did not apply.

Commenting in a statement on the Google Maps proceeding, Andreas Mundt, president of the FCO, said: “We have information to suggest that Google may be restricting the combination of its own map services with third-party map services, for example when it comes to embedding Google Maps location data, the search function or Google Street View into maps not provided by Google.

“Among other aspects, we will now examine whether this practice could allow Google to further expand its position of power regarding certain map services. We will also look into the licensing terms and conditions for the use of Google’s map services in vehicles.”

The FCO added that it will be interviewing customers and competitors of the Google Maps Platform as part of the investigation.

Google was contacted for comment. A spokesperson for the company told us:

Since the special abuse controls begun applying to its business, Google has made changes to how it operates its news licensing product and suggested some others in an apparent bid to settle that FCO probe.

Although, at the time of writing, the proceeding remains open. Back in January the regulator said it would consult on the changes proposed by Google and continue to monitor the company’s negotiations with publishers over licensing terms.

The new reality for Google in Germany is a more responsive oversight regime to competition concerns.

Last month the FCO also concluded that Facebook parent, Meta, falls in scope of the ex ante regime — meaning it too faces extra scrutiny over how it operates in the market.

An FCO proceeding to determine whether iPhone maker Apple should also have the designation is ongoing. But, earlier this month, the regulator announced a probe of Apple’s app privacy framework that it said was based on conduct that “can possibly” be classified as meeting the threshold for the special abuse regime to apply, so the FCO looks keen to avoid wasting time in being able to use the proactive powers.

Germany’s competition regulator has also been testing Amazon’s market power to make the same determination since May 2021. So the ecommerce giant could soon face amplified attention to its German ops, too.

Earlier this year, European Union lawmakers agreed on a major ex ante update to competition rules that’s set to come into force early next year  — bringing in a new regime of up-front operational rules that will apply across the bloc for tech giants which meet the definition of internet ‘gatekeepers’. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is backed up by a regime of major penalties for non-compliance.

The Government of Canada today announced that it is ending use of the app it commissioned based on the COVID-19 exposure alert API developed jointly by Google and Apple as a measure to help combat the spread of the illness. The system is disabled immediate, according to a government alert, which also advises users to delete the COVID Alert app from their devices.

As to why it’s ending the program, the release indicates that it’s tied to a significant drop in PCR testing in the country, which is resulting in very few one-time keys being issued to patients for use in the app, so usage has apparently slowed to a trickle.

Canada implemented the COVID Alert app in July 2020, and Health Canada says that since then it’s been downloaded by 6.9 million people, and provided notifications of exposures on behalf of 57,000 people who tested positive and entered their one-time key into the app.l

The COVID Alert app was developed in part by engineers at Shopify, with security review by BlackBerry, working in collaboration with provincial and federal government resources.

Meanwhile, in Ontario, the health system is seeing record demand — mostly due to spin-off effects from COVID, including staff outages, rather than COVID cases themselves. Wastewater data (the best source of infection info since most at-scale PCR testing programs have been suspended) from Ontario also indicates a rise in COVID cases in the province over the past couple of weeks.

In an effort to kick-start a greater number of Black tech Founders in Europe, last year Google for Startups launched a $2m (£1.5m) grant fund to help tackle the quite obvious and stark racial inequality in the European tech industry. That fund ended up doubling to $4m (£3m) and now 40 Black-led tech starups across Europe will receive grants from the fund.

Each startup will be given $100,000 in non-dilutive cash awards, up to $200,000 in cloud credits and ad support, mentoring by industry execs and connections inside Google’s network.

Prior to the fund’s launch in 2021, less than 0.25% of venture capital (VC) funding went to Black-led startups in the UK. 


British tech startups will make up two-thirds of the 40 companies selected across Europe, and are spread across beauty, fashion, education, construction and food/beverage.

Marta Krupinska, Head of Google for Startups UK: “For the second year in a row we’ve been able to debunk the myth of the ‘pipeline problem’. Europe is home to a wealth of talent from underrepresented backgrounds – we’re so excited to have doubled last year’s fund and partner with 40 fantastic companies, of which two-thirds are based in the UK, and one third is led by women.”

The full list is below (with the descriptions supplied by the startups themselves):

●  Aline (Sweden): Lifelong Learning, quantified and validated for increased productivity in the Information Age. 


●  Automi AI (France): Automi empowers manufacturers to automate much more tasks than ever possible. The platorm uses ML to orchestrate mobile supercomputers that users connect to their workstations and train to peorm repetitive tasks. 


●  Base Plus (UK): Combining data, machine learning and formulation expertise to create precise and personalised skincare. 

    
●  Beazy (Germany): SaaS-enabled marketplace for content production 


●  Bloomful (UK): Delivering a digitally-enabled care pathway for beer gynecological 
health. 


●  Boxx (UK): Combining boxing inspired fitness with smart tech to provide a fun and 
accessible way to workout. 


●  Compare Ethics (UK): A Sustainable Product Intelligence and Compliance platform 
enabling companies to manage, verify, and condently communicate responsible 
product claims at scale. 


●  Deep Meta (UK): Predicting production defects in metals. 


●  Devo (UK): An end-to-end operating system enabling the digital transformation of 
convenience stores. 


●  Eccobell (UK): An ecosystem of on-demand web applications using contactless 
technology to innovate how people access, communicate and interact with each other, 
unrestricted by device. 


●  Ekie (France): Ekie facilitates access to legal services for employees to improve the 
essential balance between their professional and personal lives. 


●  Feniska (Germany): A Berlin based Health-Tech sta-up building IoT products to help 
cat and dog owners track the health of their pets. 


●  FoodLama (UK): Online grocery shopping with preferences, made easy. 


●  Framework (UK): The world’s rst on-demand business school, designed exclusively for 
startups. 


●  Fresh Afrika (France): Fresh Afrika is a Paris-based FoodTech company using the 
blockchain technology to deliver a beer food experience and connect small scale 
farmers in Africa to the world. 


●  GigBridge (UK): A recruitment platform for construction companies to nd and hire 
skilled construction workers. 


●  Goodloans (UK): AI-powered digital lending platform for emerging markets. 


●  Hyndr (Germany): The B2B marketplace for the hydrogen economy. 


●  ID Protect (France): ID Protect is the 3D secure for identity documents, changing the 
game in prevention against fraud and identity theft. 


●  Kuorum (Spain): SaaS for legal and secure online voting 


●  Lenkie (UK): Providing the embedded lending infrastructure to enable online platforms 
to become a source of funding for their business users. 


●  Liquisto (Germany): Liquisto is a data-driven platform of digital solutions for sustainably 
transforming excess industrial inventory into liquidity for manufacturers and new utility 
for end-users of industrial equipment. 


●  Materials Nexus (UK): Accelerating the transition towards net-zero materials. 


●  MoonHub (UK): Viual Reality training plaorm. 


●  Nolea (UK): Solving the healthcare demand-supply mismatch problem with our 
fractional clinician marketplace plaorm. 


●  Owni (UK): A B2B SaaS company that enables fashion retailers and brands to reap the 
benefits of resale and the secondary market through a peer-to-peer resale plaorm 


●  Pace Revenue (UK): Providing real-time, automated decision intelligence, and industry 
leading BI to the hospitality industry. 

                 
●  Propel (Germany): Propel is building multi-layered digital infrastructure to power the Tech Talent Economy. 

●  Propelle (UK): A female focused financial investment plaorm, designed to get women investing more regularly and building wealth. 


●  Reach Industries (UK): A platform that leverages computer vision, voice & ML to accelerate life sciences in labs. 


●  Reframd (Germany): Inclusive eyewear products for a diverse world. 


●  Ruka (UK): The Ruka vision is to become the definitive hair brand for black women 
globally, by building an ecosystem of hair solutions which truly work. 


●  Sojo (UK): A sustainable fashiontech staup centralising & modernising the clothing 
repair and tailoring industry. 


●  SympliFi (UK): A digital lending plaorm that facilitates access to credit to underserved 
micro and SME businesses in developing countries, by making lending borderless. 


●  Tinto (UK): A wellbeing app for pregnant and postnatal mothers. 


●  TRIM-IT (UK): The UK’s rst app-powered mobile barbershops. 


●  VerifyMyAge (UK): Creates safety tech solutions designed to make the internet safer by 
solving compliance and safeguarding problems with age assurance, identity 
authentication and content moderation. 


●  Yuty (UK): An AI driven conscious beauty marketplace. 


●  Yvee (France): Yvee assists companies in the 3 main steps of a hiring process: sourcing, 
skills screening and selection. 


●  Zest (Netherlands): Zest develops soware-driven, personalized lifestyle treatment to 
prevent, control, & reverse chronic conditions such as diabetes without spending more on medications.

Large banks are stepping up their game when it comes to new services and the technology that underpins them, and in many cases they are borrowing straight from the tech world’s playbook: Instead of building in-house, to speed things up, they are tapping third parties that have already found a fix for a tricky problem, integrating their breakthroughs by way of APIs.

In the latest development, a startup called Able has built an engine to speed up the processing of  documents and other data required for commercial loans (typically $100,000 but sometimes up to $100 million in value), which it sells as a service to banks and other lenders. Today, it’s coming out of stealth mode with $20 million in funding and a launch into the wider market.

The Series A is being led by Canapi Ventures — a specialist fintech investor — with participation also from Human Capital, which also led the startup’s seed round. Diego Represas, the CEO of Able who co-founded it with Andrew Hurst, noted that there are also a couple of strategic investors — financial services companies that are already using Able’s tech — but they are not disclosing those names currently.

I write that it is launching into the wider market because although it’s coming out of stealth, Able’s actually been around since 2020, and the customers it’s picked up are already using Able’s technology — which involves RPA, computer vision and other forms of AI to ingest and process data related to loans as part of their evaluation process.

The section of the loan market that it is focusing on is larger commercial endeavors and so are being done at much higher values than the typical small business loan. That also means more parsing of paperwork related to a loan application, a cumbersome process that Able is aiming to reduce by up to 30% on a typical application.

Represas said he came to the idea of fixing this after a meeting up with cousin of his who worked in business finance and told him about the painful process that went on behind the scenes.

Represas and Hurst at the time were engineers at another fintech, Digit, and so Represas’s natural inclination was to think that there was likely already a solution in the market to cut this down.

It turned out that there wasn’t. He couldn’t believe it, he said: business loans are a $6 trillion annual market, but globally banks were spending about $60 billion annually to process those loan applications.

Perhaps the bigger market size has kept a lot of incumbents from wanting to fix what didn’t really seem broken. But we know how this song goes: there are a number of companies now also building to address this, and so perhaps it was just a matter of time before they would get their inefficient stranglehold on business loans disrupted.

“So we dove into solving this problem,” he said.

The company is picking an interesting moment to announce funding and open for business. Inflation is on the rise, and interest rates are getting hiked up in a bid to contain it.

That means it’s a complicated, but potentially interesting, time to be a fintech startup building technology to power commercial loan services for major banks and other large lenders.

On one hand, higher interest rates and the presence of inflation might make getting loans and taking any business leap or risk less attractive; on the other hand, it may be precisely the right time to have a product out there that takes friction out of the process and therefore speeds up the transaction and lowers the costs around it.

Companies, meanwhile, will still be in need of funding to grow, and in some cases you’ll have companies investing in that because their products are breaking through, maybe because of the current state of the market. (As people in tech love to point out, Google and Airbnb after all were both launched during recessions.)

You could say the same for Able. Its own product crosses into a couple of different competitive spaces. There are a number of startups out there already either working directly with businesses, or providing their tech to embed elsewhere to power business loans with new approaches that leverage AI and big data analytics. (Some like Kabbage eventually do get snapped up by incumbents: Amex acquired the SoftBank-backed startup back in 2020 after it struggled hard through the first year of the pandemic.)

Alongside that, there is a wave of companies out there targeting fast-scaling companies and making it easier to secure revolving credit and debt facilities as an alternative to the equity-based funding that they might typically consider. They include the likes of Hum (formerly called Capital) providing services directly to businesses; and Sivo, which provides debt-as-a-service; Clearco and Wayflyer both targeting e-commerce and online businesses; and more.

I should also point out that there is another fintech startup called Able, although it focuses on personal money management and is not connected to this Able at all.

Represas notes that Able’s focus on the tech that is used for processing, but not decision-making or risk-profiling (which Represas told me is just a small aspect of loan approval and not where the pain point is); the fact that it focuses on commercial loans and not SMB loans (too small an opportunity, he said); and that it does not directly interface with borrowers itself but works through banks, all make it distinct from the rest of the pack (why create new channels when those banks already have those deep relationships, was Represas’ rhetorical question to me when I asked why not). All in all, Able is disruptive, but it’s not a threat, to its customers.

And that makes it one to watch.

“Able is a game-changer. Their team is already working with several banks in the Canapi network on use cases that span the entire loan lifecycle,” said Neil Underwood, general partner at Canapi Ventures and president of Live Oak Bank, in a statement. “Able cuts the time and resources needed to process any business loan. Lenders get better economics and a scalable platform for growth. Everyone gets a modern digital experience. It’s a win-win situation for all parties involved.”

When DataStax hired Chet Kapoor as CEO in October 2019, one of the first moves he made was to bring in his old pal Sam Ramji to be chief strategy officer, someone he had worked with for many years and was deeply involved in open source throughout his career. The two had worked together successfully at Apigee, an API company that went public in 2015 before being acquired the following year by Google for $625 million.

Getting the band back together seems to have been a successful approach, as the company announced a $115 million investment on a $1.6 billion valuation today. That’s a 33% premium over a round completed just a year ago, according to the company. This is especially impressive in an economic environment where software valuations are taking a big hit and VC dollars are getting tighter.

Kapoor and Ramji took over a company almost a decade old that was best known for being the commercial company on top of the Apache Cassandra database. The two industry veterans decided it was time to modernize, made a couple of acquisitions including Kesque for streaming. Last year the company introduced Astra, a serverless database built on top of Cassandra and Astra Streaming, based on that Kesque acquisition, which the company introduced in beta last June.

Kapoor was working at Google in 2019, a place he was comfortable, but the allure of building a successful business was still there, and he saw in DataStax, a company that had the potential to get there. He believes the tweaks he and Ramji, and other new executives he brought in, are making to the product line could help them reach $1 billion in revenue at some point down the road.

He also saw a company that checked a lot of key boxes for him. “I looked at a bunch of different companies and big data stacks. If you look at the triangle of number of developers and the skills, Cassandra is right on top…Outside of infrastructure service, the TAM for NoSQL is the fastest growing market out there, a massive market growing really fast. The people are the folks that built Cassandra, and then the last thing was durability – culture and P&L,” Kapoor told me.

He says that to achieve a revenue goal like that, involves some basic principles. “My mission is to serve real time applications with an open data stack that just works.” He believes if his company can achieve that, it can attract customers building their highest growth apps. With that, he can achieve higher revenue, and it can help propel the company forward.

He’s been around long enough to understand that there is a lot of work ahead of him, but building companies on top of open source has proven a viable strategy for many startups.”I think there are many ways to build a really great company. We certainly believe that open source is critical because innovation doesn’t happen in the cathedral. It happens in the bazaar. And so we spent a lot of time with the Apache Cassandra community, the Apache pulsar community…” he said.

While there are still companies using Cassandra in private data centers, the future is in the cloud and he sees offering a serverless database like Astra as another way to grow the business. It offers developers a way to build an application without worrying about about database resources, and is part of making it just work for customers.

So far the approach has been working as the company’s investors see a viable and growing company, giving them the confidence to give DataStax a fist full of dollars at a time when many companies are struggling to get capital.

Today’s round was led by Goldman Sachs growth equity business with participation from RCM Private Markets, EDB Investments Pte. Ltd. along with existing investors Crosslink Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, OnePrime Capital and other unnamed investors.

Google showed the way when it came to the world understanding and valuing the importance of a good search engine to unlock all the information you could find on the internet. The next iteration of that has been vertical search: providing tools to delve into very specific information silos for particular uses.

And in the wave of companies building solutions for that, a New York-based company called AlphaSense, which focuses on providing search tools to query market analysis and business intelligence, has now raised $225 million. Its valuation with this Series D round — $1.7 billion post-money — is double what it was in 2021 (when it raised $180 million in a Series C round). This not only speaks to AlphaSense’s growth, but to the opportunity to address more gaps in vertical, enterprise search.

The funding is being co-led by two investors, the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs) and Viking Global Investors. Goldman Sachs is both a financial and strategic investor here, Finnish co-founder and CEO Jaakko (Jack) Kokko told me: the firm’s analysts use the platform for research and to post their own reports. The $225 figure also includes a “substantial” debt commitment from BlackRock although AlphaSense does not specify the exact amount.

When we last covered the company in 2019 — a $50 million Series B round — AlphaSense had 1,000 customers. That number has now grown to 3,500, with the last year seeing customer numbers growing by 110% in 2021, with the range of typical uses including companies in the S&P 100 (75% are customers); the Dow 50 (97%); and large asset management firms and banks (70% of all of these in the U.S., the company claims, are users); along with those working within energy, industrials, consumer goods, and technology sectors.

ARR currently stands at $100 million, although Kokko tells me AlphaSense is not yet profitable (nor choosing to be).

Covid-19, if anything, actually served as a boost the startup’s growth. The platform’s typical users — business analysts, strategists, financial planners, investors and others that regularly buy and use market reports and competitive intelligence — not only were still needing to do their work, but they were less likely to be in face-to-face meetings to discuss research with colleagues and clients to source and deliver information.

On top of that, given the lack of visibility into what was around the corner in terms of the pandemic and its impact, research, insights and simply more information were all in more demand than ever. In both of those scenarios, useful search engines to both access and disseminate research became tantamount to being on the ground.

The gap that AlphaSense identified is one that is actually not uncommon in every information silo, but how successfully it is tackled remains the tricky part. In the case of business information, Kokko said that the issue is that it comes from a huge number of sources, and in many different formats, most often delivered in narratives.

“We focus on the search for unstructured information, and we provide structure to it,” he said. Web search intelligence is a problem that is constantly being fed through machine learning algorithms. The more people search on Google, the better Google gets. “But our system has to understand language and land on the right information without the benefit and insights of millions of web searches. None of that exists for private information.”

In other words, our world — or at least, information pertaining to it — is our oyster on the internet, and search engines have been the instrument to shucking it. But the same does not apply to unstructured information when it’s basically private, not uploaded to the internet.

Beyond basic search, given the nature of why people are searching on AlphaSense in the first place, the company’s second product layer comes in the form of how it presents information.

Its algorithms are AI-based and focused around natural language understanding both to extract the meaning and aim of search queries, but also to parse the research itself.

So while AlphaSense does negotiate deals with companies for providing links to their research and making it searchable, Kokko explained that it also takes some of that information into its own hands to present it in ways that digest numerous sources into more concise search results.

This is particularly important when you consider that when, for example, you have a couple of forecasts about the market size for cloud-based security services, you can weigh up the different forecasts and what they do or don’t include, since you will often see different numbers and different KPIs from different analysts,

“We are adding more structure to unstructured data, but we’re also organizing it, providing, for example, heat maps to show who is more or less optimistic about a particular data point,” he said. “If a user asks about an addressable market size, we can provide an answer that looks and takes in all that data.”

Another area where AlphaSense wants to do more, Kokko said, is in internal company search, to help businesses organise and access their own data better. So while its current products might potentially get compared to Wolfram Alpha or LexisNexis, the internal search product would potentially bring it closer to the likes of Elastic or Algolia.

All in all, the opportunities speak to the rationale behind this investment, Goldman Sachs Growth MD Holger Staude told TechCrunch, especially at a time when so many other companies are finding it challenging to raise money.

“AlphaSense is a scaled business growing at an accelerating pace, which we attribute to the strength of the product and the team, as well as the size of the market opportunity. Irrespective of the reset in the broader tech market, we are excited to support high quality companies with strong fundamental unit economics, such as AlphaSense,” he said. “AlphaSense is building a search and intelligence platform for a broad range of users, not just financial services firms. We believe that having access to curated business information will remain a focus for enterprises through the cycle. AlphaSense is well positioned to capture this opportunity.”

The European Union is considering how to respond to a major blow to its antitrust enforcement after a court in Luxembourg sided with chipmaker Qualcomm — which had been appealing a €997 million ($1BN+) fine the EU levied against it back in 2018.

At the time, the bloc’s competition regulator concluded Qualcomm had abused its market position by providing financial incentives to iPhone maker Apple to exclusively use its chips in iPhones and iPads, between 2011 and 2016. However, per the AP, the EU General Court found a number of procedural irregularities in the case and rejected the Commission’s analysis of the conduct it had alleged against the chipmaker.

“While the Commission concluded that the incentive payments had reduced Apple’s incentives to switch to competing suppliers to source LTE chipsets, it is apparent from the Commission decision that Apple had had no technical alternative to Qualcomm’s LTE chipsets for the majority of its requirements,” the news agency reports the court setting out its reasoning for siding with Qualcomm.

Asked for its response to the ruling, a spokeswomen for the EU’s executive told us: “The European Commission takes note of today’s judgement by the General Court that annulled the Commission’s 2018 Decision which found that Qualcomm had abused its dominant position.

“The Commission will carefully study the judgement and its implications and will reflect on possible next steps.”

Qualcomm was also contacted for comment.

The Commission hit the chipmaker with another, smaller antitrust fine back in 2019 — in a separate enforcement related to what it assessed as abusive pricing of baseband chips — which Qualcomm also chose to appeal (a verdict on that appeal remains pending).

Today’s ruling is not the first time the EU’s antitrust enforcement against tech firms has faced being unpicked in court: Just under two years ago the EU’s General Court also found against a Commission decision to fine Apple $15BN for what it had claimed were illegal tax benefits in Ireland, dating back as far as 2003. (Although the EU’s executive went on to appeal in the hopes of overturning Apple’s successful appeal.)

While, back in January, the EU also had a $1.2BN antitrust fine against Intel overturned by the General Court — in a case related to practices by the chipmaker that date back as much as two decades (the penalty itself was handed down in 2009).

However the EU has (so far) had better luck making its antitrust enforcement stick against Google: Back in November 2021 the General Court largely dismissed Google’s appeal against the €2.42BN penalty the Commission handed down in 2017, in relation to anti-competitive practices linked to its product comparison search service, Google Shopping.

A number of other Commission antitrust decisions against Google are still pending appeals decisions. Such as the record-breaking $5BN penalty the EU hit the company with in 2018 for violations linked to how it operates its Android mobile platform.

Later the same year, Google appealed that decision — and its appeal was heard last year — but the court has yet to hand down a verdict.

The 2022 crisis is the third major tech downturn of the internet era, following the dot-com bubble and the Great Recession.

Many experts are dispensing advice to founders on how to weather this storm. While this advice is broadly helpful, we must consider that it’s been approximately 14 years since the last major correction, and few in our industry have actively gone through a full economic cycle. Therefore, it is important to remember that good advice is tailored, specific and, more importantly, contextual.

Each company is unique and faces diverse circumstances. Does a downturn affect every company identically? No. Do some companies have more favorable balance sheets than others? Yes. Are some companies able to raise funds even in difficult circumstances? Absolutely.

The best advice for handling the downturn should be based on the length of your runway and the efficiency of your business. Runway falls into one of three categories:

• Two years or more;
• Between one and two years;
• A year or less.

The corresponding strategy for each would be, respectively, “stay aggressive,” “ruthlessly prioritize,” and “time to trim.”

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch+ has notes from an interview with the author of this letter, Mike Volpi — including the potentially good news it contains for many startups — coming shortly. The following letter was lightly edited and reformatted for our pages.

Great companies are born in difficult times

Great businesses have been built and have flourished through some of the most difficult times. Famously, Google raised capital in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, grew through the downturn, and was able to distance itself from the competition. Salesforce, founded shortly before the 2001 crisis, survived the storm effectively, even though it almost went out of business in its early days. Most recently, Uber enjoyed a similar rise during the Great Recession.

Turbulence does require a different skill set from founders. Gone are the days of “grow at all costs.” Today’s environment requires subtle and precise control and management of the business. When navigated carefully, these periods can separate the wheat from the chaff.

The first step in navigating through stormy waters is to make a cold, hard assessment of your business:

• How much cash runway do you have?
• Do you have the proverbial product-market fit?
• Is your growth strategy cash-efficient?
• Have you evaluated and prioritized your engineering projects and marketing programs?
• What is your competition doing?

If you have two-plus years of runway, stay aggressive