Salesforce was a much smaller company back then, and the deal would have been a huge stretch. Perhaps the company’s interest stemmed from the fact that Microsoft had recently bought LinkedIn for $26 billion, and Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff wanted to add a social component to his cloud CRM company.
Other companies were rumored to be interested back then, including Microsoft, Google, and Verizon (TechCrunch’s owner at the time). But Salesforce emerged from the pack as the most interested buyer.
Why Twitter? The idea was to combine the social component of Twitter with sales and service on the Salesforce platform. But it was not to be, which the company made official on October 14, 2016, when Benioff told the Financial Times that it wasn’t the right fit.
In hindsight, it was probably better for Salesforce to pass, as the vendor was busy enough. Holger Mueller, analyst at Constellation Research
Salesforce would eventually buy Mulesoft in 2018 for $6.5 billion and Tableau for $15.7 billion in 2019, two deals that were worth almost as much and were, arguably, a much better fit for the CRM giant than Twitter would have been.
Twitter thus remained an independent platform and there was little known M&A interest in it until recently.
But what if history went a bit differently and Salesforce acquired the company? We spoke to some analysts who cover the CRM industry to get their thoughts.
Maintaining focus
To start with, Salesforce investors didn’t like the idea, and Benioff had to acquiesce eventually. Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, said investors were straight up against the deal.
“I think at the time it was hard to justify the price tag, but I’ve always thought the right buyer could’ve done something significant with Twitter,” he said. “If Salesforce had pulled the trigger, it would’ve been interesting to see what that combination could’ve done, especially now with Salesforce+ (the company’s media arm) being in the mix.”
Last week, TechCrunch first spotted the long-rumored “Switch to Android” app for iOS users had been quietly published on the App Store. The app helps users to migrate important content — like contacts, calendars, photos, and videos — from an iPhone to a new Android device. But while the app was technically live, it wasn’t yet “officially” available to App Store users via search or discovery mechanisms. Now, that’s changing, Google says.
On Monday evening around 6 PM PT, the Switch to Android app began to roll out to the public, Google tells us. The company says it expects this process to reach 10% of users by the end of the day on Tuesday, April 19, and 100% of users over the next couple of weeks.
As reported, the app supports all the same data types as Google Drive does. Before, Google’s suggested process for moving to Android from iPhone involved having users back up their contacts, calendar, photos, and videos via the Google Drive iOS app before changing devices. The new Switch to Android app does the same thing, but offers a “faster, more streamlined” experience, Google says.
Image Credits: Google
Google additionally offers a way to physically connect devices in order to move more content, including music, audio, wallpapers, alarms, call logs, device settings, and free apps. But the new app’s App Store description explains it can be used instead of “fussy cables” to make the transfers.
In addition to moving data, the new Switch to Android app offers other instructions about the transfer process — like how to deregister iMessage in order to continue getting texts on the new Android device.
Google says it plans to add support for more data types to the app over the next several months.
Transferring data from an iPhone via the new app will initially support Google Pixel devices as the destination device, but will add support for other OEMs at a later date.
The launch follows other efforts by Google to make it easier for users to transfer their content to its own platform and services through backend developments. This includes the recent update to the Google Photos app that offered a way for mobile device owners to copy over photos from rival cloud storage services, including iCloud, Facebook, and others.
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.
In his offer letter, he said Twitter has to be “transformed as a private company.” If Twitter refuses his bid — which Twitter is trying to do — Musk warned he would “need to reconsider” his position as a Twitter shareholder. Who knows, maybe that was the plan all along?! He then went onstage at a TED event to tell the audience that, well: “I am not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it.”
No, way, really? Musk’s $54.20 per share offer — get it? 420? WEED! — was a joke? Who could have guessed it?
Ugh, billionaires.
Musk is playing with Twitter as if it’s a toy, either as a pump and dump for a little needed cash (the dump part’s pending…as of the time of writing on Friday), or to give himself a few minutes of attention where he can loudly proclaim things like: “Twitter has become kind of a de facto town square, so it’s really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” Or because he liked to briefly envision himself as Twitter’s new king. Or because he got bored. Or all of the above.
Okay, sure, whatever. It’s all been a ridiculous circus and one that’s not helping a company that’s finally getting on the right track in terms of product development efforts, amid a transitional period where it was going to be able to redefine itself under a new CEO following Jack Dorsey’s departure.
Musk wouldn’t have much time to devote to actually running Twitter, if he bought it, given his leadership positions as the chief exec at both SpaceX and Telsa. Mostly, he seems to want to throw his money around so that Twitter has to listen to his ideas: how about ad-free Twitter Blue?, instant verification for Blue subscribers? and, of course, how about turning down those pesky content moderation dials? Like way, way down? If successful on the latter point, Twitter wouldn’t be improved — it would be chaos. Or worse, Parler.
But in the wake of Musk’s lowball offer, Twitter’s future — regardless of whether he himself buys it — is no longer certain.
Tim Cook speaks out against sideloading…again
Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks at IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals) Global Summit 2022 in Washington, DC. Image Credits: Apple
Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage this week at IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit to once again call out companies whose business model is built on mining users’ data — a not-so-subtle reference to Facebook, whose ability to serve personalized ads was impacted by Apple’s App Store privacy changes to the tune of $10 billion. The exec also reiterated Apple’s position against sideloading — the practice of loading apps onto mobile devices from outside the App Store.
Although Google has long allowed its users to install Android apps outside the Play Store, Apple has staunchly resisted the idea, saying it puts users’ privacy and security at risk from bad actors.
The company last year published a 31-page document explaining why it believes sideloading apps could lead to an increase in malware and scams, which would outweigh the consumer benefits of alternative app stores where fees may be reduced as developers could avoid paying Apple’s commissions. Apple critics, of course, believe the company’s position is more about its desire to maintain its tight grip on the mobile app ecosystem and its accompanying App Store revenues. Fortnite maker Epic Games, for instance, is appealing a lower court’s ruling over the App Store business model’s anti-competitive nature. The gaming company wants to serve its mobile games to users outside the App Store to avoid paying Apple commissions, but Apple insists that opening up the iPhone to third-party stores or web downloads is a slippery slope.
Apple proponents often agree that there are risks involved with sideloading, as Apple states. For instance, Apple’s documentation pointed out that Android devices were found to have 15-47x more malware infections than iPhones over the past four years, citing data from Nokia’s prior Threat Intelligence Reports.
But bills that would permit sideloading are gaining bipartisan support in the U.S., which Cook specifically spoke about today, saying they “could put our privacy and security at risk,” and were of deep concern to Apple. Notably, he didn’t only focus on how sideloading could increase the risks of malware, but also on how companies could use the feature to route around Apple’s existing privacy protection to once again track users’ data.
“To be clear, Apple is in favor of privacy regulation. We have long been supporters of the GDPR and we applaud the many countries that have enacted privacy laws of their own. We also continue to call for a strong comprehensive privacy law in the United States. And we are grateful to all the global leaders who are working to advance privacy rights, including the rights of children in particular,” Cook said.
“But we are deeply concerned about regulations that would undermine privacy and security in service of some other aim. Here in Washington and elsewhere, policymakers are taking steps, in the name of competition, that would force Apple to let apps onto iPhone that circumvent the App Store through a process called sideloading. That means data-hungry companies would be able to avoid our privacy rules, and once again track our users against their will,” he added.
Cook also pointed to how sideloading enabled users to be infected with ransomware during the pandemic after being tricked into installing illegitimate COVID-tracing apps. The scheme, he said, “directly targeted those who could install apps from websites that lack the App Store’s defenses.”
Given how many scammy apps slip through the cracks of the “App Store’s defenses” these days, a world where there’s no moderation at all could, in fact, be worse. The real question is whether or not individuals should have the right to take on that risk for themselves.
Elsewhere in the speech, Cook raised concerns about companies that data-mine users for profit. Though tech rivals like Google and Facebook were not mentioned by name in the speech, they were clearly the intended targets of some of Cook’s remarks. At one point, he alluded to companies tracking user data as an “emergency.”
“At this very moment, companies are mining data about the details of our lives. The shops and restaurants we frequent. The causes we support. The websites we choose to read. These companies defend their actions as pure of intention, as the work of better serving us with more targeted experiences,” said Cook. “But they don’t believe we should have a real choice in the matter. They don’t believe that they should need our permission to peer so deeply into our personal lives.”
To illustrate the problem, Cook painted a dramatic picture of what this would look like if it took place in the physical world, calling it an “emergency.”
“Imagine a stranger following you as you take your child to school, holding a camera outside the driver’s side window, recording everything you do. Imagine you open your computer and the stranger is suddenly watching your every keystroke. You wouldn’t call that a service. You would call it an emergency. In the digital world, it is one too,” he said.
Weekly News
Platforms: Apple
Apple updated its iMovie app with new features, Storyboards and Magic Movie. Storyboards offer users pre-made templates for popular types of videos shared on social, with colleagues or with classmates, while Magic Movie instantly creates a video from the clips and photos a user selects, automatically adding transitions, effects and music to the edit.
Apple’s iOS 16 beta included references in the code that seem to point to the long-rumored Mixed Reality (AR/VR) headset Apple has under development. The beta also points to possible notifications changes, health-tracking features and possibly a new multitasking interface for iPad.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) may have led to $16 billion in revenue losses among big tech companies like Meta, Twitter, Snap and YouTube, a report by Lotame said.
Platforms: Google
Google quietly launched its awaited “Switch to Android” mobile app for iOS that helps users transfer their contacts, calendar, photos and videos from their iPhone to a new Android device. The app is not yet discoverable in the App Store.
Android Auto 7.5 arrived on the Play Store, but the changes this time around appear to be under the hood.
E-commerce & Food Delivery
Pinterest partnered with the e-commerce platform WooCommerce, allowing its merchants to turn their product catalogs into shoppable Pins.
TikTok launched Effect House into open beta. The new AR development platform allows creators to make AR effects that others can use in TikTok videos. The platform offers creation tools, documentation, templates, and the occasional live demo from TikTok engineers.
Walmart introduced “shoppable” AR content on Snapchat with a new AR lens to inspire users to make recipes with ingredients from home or those they can order from Walmart.
A portion of Etsy’s sellers went on strike for a week over a 1.5% increase in the site’s transaction fees.
Fintech
Investing app Public launched a new “Learn and Earn” hub where users can complete courses related to investing and earn rewards, like a free slice of stock or ETF as a reward for leveling up.
India’s payments body, the National Payments Corporation of India, approved WhatsApp’s plan to extend its payments serviceto 60 million additional users in India, to allow WhatsApp Pay to reach up to 100 million in total.
Robinhood’s trading app added SHIB, SOL, COMP and MATIC to its service, leading Shiba Inu to rally by 35% on the move.
Coinbase suspended support for UPI payments on its app in India, less than four days after launching the trading service. The National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI, had said that it was not aware of any crypto exchange using UPI payments.
Coinbase shareholders have filed a class-action lawsuitagainst the company for deceptively positive statements, noting the company had failed to disclose things like the amount of cash it would need to scale and how susceptible to outages it would be.
TikTok star and musician Bella Poarch’s latest brand deal has her becoming the face of Cash App. The deal has the star modeling Cash App’s clothing line (?!!) and giving away $100,000 in bitcoin.
Social
Image Credits: Snap
Snapchat’s latest feature is able to automatically create Stories for publishers based on the news stories they post online. The feature leverages RSS feeds, and the generated Stories will appear in the app’s Discover section.
Snapchat also debuted its fifth cohort of Yellow accelerator startups. The eight startups will take up a 13-week residency at Snap’s HQ, and include companies focused on finance, e-commerce, dating, social, AR and more.
TikTok is testing a private dislike button for comments. The dislike won’t be public and commenters won’t know they’ve been downvoted in this way. But TikTok could use the feature to inform a comment-ranking algorithm in the future.
India’s ban on Chinese apps in the country has allowed TikTok rival Josh to thrive after TikTok itself was blocked. Josh now has more than 150 million MAUs and a $5 billion valuation as of April.
TikTok is found to be dominated by pro-war content in Russia after its ban on new uploads, per a study examining the impacts of the Russian “fake news” law. TechCrunch also found that Russian state media was continuing to post to TikTok a month after the app blocked new content originating in Russia.
TikTok users spent a record $874 million on in-app payments from January-March 2022, up 184% year-over-year, per data.ai data (previously App Annie.) The app reached 1.6 billion MAUs by the end of March.
Pinterest launched its latest version of its API (v5), saying it’s the first time in the company’s history it’s offering a developer-centric open API that any developer can apply to.
Photos
Meta subpoenaed “competitor” Dispo, a social photo-sharing startup, in an attempt to prove it wasn’t a monopoly. Dispo fought the summons, which had seen the tech giant send 36 requests for its internal documents, including metrics, calling Meta’s requests “unduly burdensome, overbroad, vexatious and harassing.”
Messaging
Image Credits: WhatsApp
WhatsApp introduced Communities— a new, organized group chat feature that includes admin tools, file sharing, emoji reactions, 32-person calls and more, allowing clubs, schools and other private groups to host chats with thousands of users. Only admins can announce to the entire group, but members can chat more freely in sub-group chats. The update could allow the app to compete with other group chat products or even Facebook’s own Groups, to some extent. But WhatsApp clarifies its difference is that chats are more personal — users would see each other’s phone numbers, for example. They may also be networked in the real world, unlike Facebook’s larger interest-based Groups. Communities will initially launch with select testers for feedback, but some of the other features designed for Communities will arrive on WhatsApp for general access sooner.
Dating
Image Credits: Tinder
Tinder added a “Festival Mode” to its mobile app that allows members to make connections before heading out to a concert or music festival. The feature was launched in partnership with Live Nation and event producers AEG Presents and Superstruct Entertainment.
Streaming & Entertainment
Image Credits: Spotify
Spotify rebranded its companion app Spotify Greenroom as Spotify Live and integrated its live audio capabilities directly into its main streaming app, minus the interactive features. Only select creators from Spotify’s originals will be able to go live in the main app. Independent creators will still be able to stream in Spotify Live, however.
YouTube said it will now make all public videos on its platform eligible to be remixed into YouTube Shorts (short-form video) content unless creators opt out. The one exception to this will be music videos, where licensing issues prevent re-use.
Clubhouse added a dark mode for your nighttime streaming.
Artists are criticizing TikTok’s new music distribution service SoundOn, claiming issues with delays and audience reach.
Plex drops its plan to be a podcast streaming app. The company said it was ending support for streaming podcasts along with web shows to instead focus on its ad-supported video streaming efforts.
Spotify-owned podcast creation app Anchor rolled out support for 35 more languages.
Gaming
Would-be Roblox rival Rec Room, a cross-platform app including VR, reached 3 million monthly active users specifically in VR.
Amazon launched its first original mobile games since 2015 with the debut of Amazon Kids+ original games, “Super Spy Ryan” and “Do, Re & Mi” based on its popular shows.
Niantic launched its first original AR game in nearly a decade not tied to another company’s existing intellectual property with the debut of Peridot.
Mobile game app spending was down 6.3% year-over-year in March 2022, per Sensor Tower data, to reach $7 billion in player spending. The U.S. was the top market with $1.9 billion or 27.4% of spend, followed by China (19.2%), then Japan (19%). The top game was Tencent’s Honor of Kinds, with $272.4 million in spending.
Square Enix unveiled Kingdom Hearts 4 and a new Kingdom Hearts mobile game, Missing-Link, for iOS and Android, as part of its 20th Anniversary Event.
Zynga launched FarmVille 3 in Japan, after having first debuted in November 2021 for most other countries.
Health & Fitness
A free iPad app called Staybl launched to help people with involuntary hand tremors due to conditions like Parkinson’s be able to use the tablet computer.
Apple is planning to add new features to its Health app this year that will include things like medication reminders, additional sleep tracking and possibly body temperature sensing. Plans to add a blood pressure monitor to Apple Watch were scaled back, however.
Government & Policy
Apple will face another antitrust charge in the EU related to its music streaming efforts, Reuters reported. Last year, the European Commission accused Apple of anticompetitive behavior by restricting developers to its own in-app payment system and preventing them from informing users of other purchasing options.
Funding and M&A
Welcome Tech, a startup building a “Super App” aimed at immigrants, raised $30 million in funding led by TTV Capital, bringing its total raise to date to $70 million. The funding will bridge the gap between the B and C rounds for the company. The app offers a banking service, including a debit card and a bilingual mobile app.
Fortnite-maker Epic Games raised $2 billion in funding from Sony and Kirkbi, the parent company of the Lego Group, with both companies investing $1 billion each. The deal values the company at $31.5 billion. Epic said the funding will go toward its plans to build out a kid-friendly metaverse in addition to supporting its further growth.
Nigeria-based digital banking app Umba raised $15 million in Series A funding, two years after raising its $2 million seed. The app offers free bank accounts, interbank transfers, peer-to-peer transfers and bill payments.
U.K.-based Wagestream, a startup offering salary advances to employees through an app, raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Smash Capital, along with $115 million in debt. The app targets front-line workers and others paid in hourly wages.
Twitter acquired the mobile engagement platform OpenBack for an undisclosed sum. The deal will help Twitter to enhance its push notifications via on-device data processing, unlike conventional push notification SDKs.
China-based game engine developers, Cocos Technologies, raised $50 million in Series B funding from CCB Trust, a subsidiary of China Construction Bank, GGV Capital and real-time communication solution provider Agora. Cocos is best known for its cross-platform, open source engine for 2D mobile games.
Voyager Innovations, the owner of Philippines’ payment and financial services app PayMaya and neobank Maya Bank, raised $210 million in new funding. The round was led by SIG Venture Capital, bringing its valuation to $1.4 billion.
Berlin-based Choco, a startup that makes ordering tools for restaurants and suppliers, raised $111M in Series B2 funding at a $1.2B valuation, bringing its funding to $282.5 million. The company offers apps for iOS and Android focused on streamlining ordering for the food industry.
Mental health app Real raised $37 million in Series B funding led by Owl Ventures, bringing its total funding to $53 million. The app offers subscriptions from $13 per month, allowing users to access therapists, therapist-created mental health programs and resources, events and more.
Dating app SwoonMe raised a second round of seed funding in the amount of $1 million from Foxhog Ventures. The company had previously raised $200,000 in its first seed round from angel investors last year after its July launch. The startup claims nearly ~50,000 downloads after launching in India.
Downloads
Pokémon GO maker Niantic announced the upcoming launch of its latest augmented reality mobile game Peridot. Unlike prior efforts, this game is not based on other companies’ intellectual property, but will instead allow users to care for virtual, magical animals called Peridots. The Dots, as they’re called for short, will be able to distinguish between different types of terrain when viewed in AR and will acquire different types of items based on their surroundings, as well. Players will also be able to breed Dots when they reach adulthood to unlock new types of virtual pets. The new game will soft-launch this month in select test markets on iOS and Android.
And lastly, because Apple won't cede an inch in the in-app purchase space, you also have to pop a modal before the link saying HERE BE DRAGONS: pic.twitter.com/bfQqlkqAlB
I've now been asked multiple times for my take on Elon's offer for Twitter.
So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private. (I have little knowledge/insight into how actual takeover battles work or play out)
Major League Baseball may have started in the 19th century and come of age in the 20th, but it is definitely no stranger to technology, whether it’s the cloud for storing and analyzing troves of data or figuring out how to customize and enhance fans’ experience.
To do all of that, MLB uses a range of technology from customized video search and Statcast for advanced statistics to streaming and mobile apps and games for its fans. The league is already welcoming NFTs and looking at AR and VR as it tries to take advantage of whatever tech is out there that makes sense for baseball.
I spoke to Vasanth Williams, the league’s head of engineering and chief product officer, to get a better sense of the technology being adopted and how it’s used.
Williams said baseball has its fingers in so many tech pies that there’s no such thing as a typical day for him.
“It’s hard to have a typical day, because the breadth of our portfolio products is quite large. But overall, the biggest priority for me is to drive fan engagement — leveraging all the new technologies and the data we have to help not just understand the game itself better or the data that we generate, but also create new and interesting experiences for fans in ways they can better connect to baseball, and also the community at large,” he said.
Williams was hired by MLB after stints at Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, so he understands Big Tech and said he saw a chance to work in a place that is constantly trying to innovate and take advantage of available technology.
“MLB has a long history of leveraging data and technology, and being an early adopter of a lot of the technologies, which I love doing. I’m happy to join the journey to continue that and push the envelope in sports technology as a whole,” he said.
MLB FilmRoom lets you search for video footage from across baseball. Image Credits: MLB
MLB briefly worked with AWS to build its cloud stack, but it has now gone all-in with Google Cloud. The league is now building a platform for creating applications, which individual teams can also take advantage of.
YouTube’s TikTok competitor known as YouTube Shorts is today launching a new feature, similar to TikTok’s Stitch, that will allow creators to incorporate a short video segment from another user’s YouTube video or Shorts video when creating new Shorts content. The feature is an expansion of YouTube Shorts’ existing “remix” functionality which had previously allowed creators to sample audio from other videos into their own Shorts posts.
YouTube videos across the platform will be immediately opted into remixing by default. That means if a creator doesn’t want their content remixed into Shorts, they have to opt out from YouTube Studio, the company explains.
There’s just one exception to this rule: Music videos with copyrighted content from YouTube’s music partners are not eligible to be remixed.
However, content on YouTube Shorts itself cannot be opted out of remixing, says YouTube. For comparison, TikTok creators are able to prevent others from sampling from their videos on an individual basis from the video’s privacy settings, in addition to setting default permissions for all their videos from the app’s main privacy settings.
Shorts creators who want to restrict the use of their content in other videos have fewer options. Instead, they can only choose to delete their own original Short, which would remove their audio from the other Shorts that used it. It would also delete all the other Shorts that had sampled their video content. Of course, this could be problematic for creators who had remixed their content into successful videos, as their remixed Shorts would then disappear.
With this policy, it’s clear YouTube intends for its Shorts ecosystem to grow to become a large public platform, like YouTube itself. But it’s also an aggressive stance to automatically opt in everyone who’s ever uploaded to YouTube, making their content potential fodder for Shorts videos. Instagram introduced a similar tactic with its own Remix functionality. Together, these choices highlight how much of a threat TikTok is perceived to be by the established tech giants.
Image Credits: YouTube
To use the new remix feature, users will first tap on “Create,” then select “Cut” from the remix options. From there, they’ll be able to sample a one- to five-second video segment from any eligible video on demand or other YouTube Shorts video and incorporate that into their own.
When a Short is created from the user’s own channel’s existing content, it will be attributed back to the original video with a link in the Shorts player. This, explains YouTube, provides a way for creators to reach an untapped audience to engage with their long-form content. The attribution will work the same way if the sample is from someone else’s channel, too.
This expansion of Remix means billions of videos from across YouTube will now be available to Shorts creators, offering YouTube a potential competitive advantage over newer platforms like Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight and to some extent, even TikTok — none of which have as extensive a history of user uploads as YouTube does.
Image Credits: YouTube
More broadly, YouTube tells TechCrunch it believes this launch will help fuel the rise of the “hybrid creator” — meaning one who produces different types of videos, including short-form content, longer videos on demand and live videos. The benefit of this model is the creator’s ability to earn revenue from multiple streams, instead of being pigeon-holed into only one format. (YouTube’s rival TikTok seems to have also considered the need to woo creators used to producing longer videos. In February, TikTok expanded the max video length on its platform to 10 minutes, up from three minutes previously, in an obvious attempt to challenge YouTube.)
In addition to today’s news of the Remix addition, YouTube says it’s also making its Shorts player available to users on more devices, including desktop and tablet devices, as well as the mobile web.
Image Credits: YouTube
Over the next few weeks, users across these platforms will find a Shorts shelf on the Home page and a Shorts tab, similar to what’s already been available in the main YouTube app. When they find a Shorts video they want to watch, they can then navigate into the Shorts experience and swipe vertically to see more videos, similar to TikTok’s feed. These views will count toward creators’ eligibility for the Shorts Fund, the company says.
Announced last summer, YouTube’s $100 million Shorts Fund is designed to reward creators for their most engaging and most viewed short-form videos through the end of 2022. Every month, YouTube offers thousands of eligible creators the ability to claim a payment from the fund. The payouts may range anywhere from $100 to $10,000, based on viewership and engagement, the company had previously explained.
Only the creator of the video seeing the engagement gets the fund payout. There’s no revenue share with the original creator of the source video that ended up remixed. This is how it works on other platforms, though. And YouTube notes that it may help the original video’s creator connect with a new audience.
Image Credits: YouTube
Currently, Shorts Fund payments are the only way creators can make money from Shorts, but YouTube tells us it’s working on a long-term monetization model for the platform, which it plans to announce in the months ahead.
Creators will be able to track what videos of theirs have been remixed from YouTube Analtyics. Soon, YouTube will introduce notifications that will alert creators when their videos get remixed.
The expanded ability to remix from YouTube videos will begin rolling out today on iOS devices and will arrive on Android in the near future, says YouTube.
Inevitably, large businesses will collect all kinds of sensitive data. Often, that’s personal identifiable data (PII) of their customers and employees, or other information that only a select number of users should get access to. But as the amount of data that large businesses collect increases, manual data discovery and classification can’t scale anymore. With Automatic DPL [Data Loss Prevention], Google recently launched a tool that helps its BigQuery users discover and classify sensitive data in their data warehouse and set access policies based on those discoveries. Automatic DLP was previously in public preview and is now generally available.
“One of the challenges that we see a lot of our customers facing is really around understanding their data so they can better protect it, preserve the privacy of PII for their customers, meet compliance, or just better govern their data,” Scott Ellis, Google Cloud’s product manager for this service, told me. “We really feel that one of the challenges that they face is really just that initial awareness or visibility into their data.”
Ellis noted that the manual processes that many companies had put in place aren’t able to cope with the scale of data that is now coming in. So it takes an automated system to go in and inspect every column for PII, for example, to ensure that this data isn’t unintentionally exposed.
Image Credits: Google Cloud
There is also an additional wrinkle here in that a lot of companies also collect large amounts of unstructured data. “One of the biggest challenges we’ve heard from customers is around: when they have a column of email addresses, it’s good to know. Once you know it, you can treat it as that. But when you have unstructured data, it’s a little bit of a different challenge. You might have a note field. It’s super valuable. But every once in a while, somebody puts something sensitive in there. Treating those as a little bit different. Sometimes, the remediation is different for those,” Ellis explained.
To make it a bit easier to get started with Automatic DLP, the team built a number of new dashboard templates for Google’s Data Studio to give users easier access to an advanced summary and a more graphical investigation tool. They can also use the Google Cloud Console to drill into their data, but that’s not the most user-friendly experience. They can, of course, also take this data to Looker or another BI tool to investigate it, but the team wanted to give users an easy access point to working with their data that encapsulated a lot of its own learnings.
Image Credits: Google Cloud
With this release, Google is also giving users new tools to set the frequency and conditions for when their data is profiled. When the service launched, the Google team set the defaults, but in talking to customers, it quickly became clear that there were often use cases where the profiler had to run at different intervals. If somebody changes a table’s schema, for example, one company may want that to be profiled right away and another may want to wait a few days for that table to populate with new data.
Another new feature the team built is an integration with Chronicle, Google Cloud’s security analytics service. The service can now automatically sync risk scores for every table with Chronicle and the team promises to build additional integrations over time.
Cloud security is one of the big drivers among enterprises making IT investments this year, according to a recent report from Gartner, which estimated that some $4.4 trillion in IT spend overall in 2022. Today, a startup called DoControl, which is building what it describes “no code” solutions for one part of that security stack — securing log-ins across cloud apps — is announcing $30 million in funding to expand.
The funding is coming in the form of a Series B round of funding led by Insight Partners, with other unnamed previous backers also participating. New York-headquartered with R&D operations also in Israel, DoControl came out of stealth last year and its list of investors also includes RTP Global, StageOne Ventures, Cardumen Capital and security firm CrowdStrike, which is both a financial and strategic backer, working with DoControl within its own company and incorporating it also into its platform.
The issue that DoControl is tackling is one that has grown with the way that enterprises work today. As more companies shift more of their IT activities into cloud environments, collaboration doesn’t just happen between people in the same organization; increasingly people share documents and data across different companies, too.
That’s great, but problems arise when people change roles, or leave organizations, or projects move around and those who attached to documents fail to update sharing accessibility to the data within those shared apps and documents. It’s not a matter of it not being possible for an organization to revoke access, but across many applications sharing is enabled on a per-user basis, and so it means it needs to be disabled on a per-user basis, too, but because we’re busy and distracted, it often isn’t.
“So even if you delete a user from the wider system, that information might still be shared,” said Adam Gavish, the CEO of DoControl. “If I start a doc on, say, Google and then share it with a vendor, from what we see no one ever goes back to the doc and removes the sharing privilege. You don’t remember what you shared, you don’t have the context and it’s done and buried across multiple ecosystems. ”
Gavish saw this problem first-hand: he worked on privacy and security at Google Cloud prior to founding DoControl. It was there that he first started identifying the problem, but struggled to get people to want to build something to address it. “They had other priorities,” he said.
Things are rapidly changing, however, with security breaches such as the one at Okta putting a focus on how even zero-trust network and app authentication may not always be enough to protect data.
DoControl’s solution is built on the idea of attaching a zero-trust security principle to data access, similar to the zero-trust approach that many vendors have built around network or app access, where users are required to log in to use apps.
“We are not reinventing the wheel,” Gavish jokes. But they are, maybe more accurately, building a wheel that is more fit for purpose, to work with the specific vehicle people are driving today. Users are authenticated, but equally when they leave an organization, or change roles, and then try to use the same documents, it can be seen, flagged, and if needed stopped. The system is also set up to monitor and stop when users — current and past, with access yet to be revoked — are also moving data in and out of apps, which is particularly important in cases where personal information is involved.
DoControl today provides integrations into what Gavish described as “the top 15” cloud app platforms, which include Google and Microsoft apps (including GitHub), Jira, and Salesforce (including Slack).
Although there is an API available now for integrating DoControl into wider security authentication framework, some of the funding will be used to build a more powerful API aimed at security developers who can then build integrations with whatever other apps an organization is using that DoControl may not already support by default. Currently, when those use cases arise, end users have to ask DoControl to build those integrations itself.
“Every modern company has to deal with the risk of unmanageable SaaS data access, where sensitive company, employee, and customer data are stored within popular enterprise applications. DoControl offers a rare combination of asset management, security automation, and remediation actions that eliminate the risk of exposure created by a lack of SaaS data protection capabilities,” said Stephen Ward, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “In my time as a CISO, I saw the importance of technology that quickly and effectively addresses these issues, and it’s why we’re proud to partner with DoControl as they continue to grow.”
Gavish, who co-founded DoControl with Omri Weinberg (CRO) and Liel Ran (CTO), described CrowdStrike as not just an investor but a “paying customer.”
“When [CrowdStrike] detects malware on the end point we can find and remove the log-in,” he said, adding that CrowdStrike turning to a third party like DoControl for this work is a “testament to how hard all this is.” Netskope and BetterCloud are among competitors also building tools to address the same problem DoControl is, which is another reason for investing in more tools to integrate DoControl into more environments. A further partnership with Datadog, to open up incident reports directly after detecting the user log-in, is also in the works.
The medium is the message more than ever these days, and brands are faced with a challenge — but also opportunity — to capture what consumers think about them and their products if they can harness and better understand those messages, via whichever medium is being used to deliver them. Today, a company called BlueOcean that has built an artificial intelligence-powered platform that it says can produce those insights is announcing $30 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue expanding its technology on the heels of rapid growth.
Insight Partners led the round, with FJ Labs also participating. Valuation is not being disclosed.
Digital life as it plays out these days has created a perfect storm (heh) for BlueOcean. We spend more time online than ever before, and the number of places where we might encounter a product or service has grown along with that: social media feeds are noisy with ads, content that feels like ads, lots of opinions; we do most of our news, information and entertainment sourcing online; we shop there, too; and many of us also spend our days working in cyberspace as well.
That’s a lot of real estate where a brand (or a brand’s competitors) might potentially appear, either intentionally or inadvertently, and more likely than not in a form that is outside of that brand’s control.
“Fragmentation is a huge driver,” Grant McDougall, the CEO who co-founded the company with president Liza Nebel, said in an interview. “There are silos all over the business and what we do sits over the top of that, to provide a common language to understand and talk to, for example, both to the CFO about revenue team as well as loyalty teams about messaging.”
At the same time, the tech industry that has built all of those online experiences has also built an enormous amount of tools to better parse what is going on in that universe. AI is playing a huge role in that navigation game: it’s too much for a single human, or even a large team of humans, to parse; and so a company like BlueOcean building tech to do some of that work for marketing professionals and others to have better data to work with becomes very valuable.
That has played out as a very significant evolution for the startup.
We last covered BlueOcean in 2020 when it was focused on a more narrow concept of digital brand identity: a company provided its website and a list of competitors, and one week later, for a price of $17,000, BlueOcean provided customers with brand audits that included lists of actionable items to improve or completely change. (As a point of contrast, typically brand audits for large brands can cost millions of dollars and typically do not come with specific pointers for improvement.)
Fast forward to today, and the company has expanded the scope of what it does for customers, and its overall engagement: its AI algorithms and big-data ingestion engine are now focused on providing continuous feedback to its customers, which subscribe to the service at fees starting at $100,000 per year. They use BlueOcean not just to measure their overall brand recognition in the market, but to track how specific products are performing; which launch strategies are working, and which are not; and the impact of different campaigns in different markets in real time so that they can change and respond more quickly.
“Lots has changed,” said McDougall. “We’re an AI powered brand intelligence platform. Access to insights and what competitors are doing are more relevant today than it’s ever been. What we do is collect information about brands out in public and help them understand performance relative to competitors, to help them take action to improve their brands to get market share.”
Interestingly, just as the Covid-19 pandemic has been a huge fillip to e-commerce and more generally online consumption of everything, so too has it played a strong role in the growth of BlueOcean and the approach that it takes. In the world of fast-paced and constantly changing and refreshed information, big-picture insights can be more meaningful than no picture at all, or one delayed for the sake of more detail.
“Covid has surfaced that speed is more important than accuracy,” noted Nebel. “We have data [to shape better] inclinations right now. It’s about making changes to capture opportunity.”
That concept has also clicked with its investors.
“Having invested in hundreds of the world’s most well-known brands, we know that having accurate and fast data is vital to brand health. We have extreme faith in BlueOcean and we’re excited to bring them into our investment portfolio,” said Fabrice Grinda, founding partner of FJ Labs, in a statement.
BlueOcean still also provides all-important competitive analysis but builds those lists of other companies and the data produced about them in conjunction with its customers, based in part on where the customer sees itself and would like to see itself; and also where it is as a brand in the real world.
It has also expanded its customer list: it now works with 84 brands, which may not sound like much except that these are some of the biggest companies in the world — they include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Diageo, Cisco, Bloomingdales and Juniper Networks (and others that it cannot name) — and collectively represent what BlueOcean describes as $18 trillion in value and more than 6,000 brands — a list investors believe is poised to grow in line with how the internet itself is growing.
“After leading BlueOcean’s Series A round, we are proud to also lead their Series B to help them scale and serve even more brands,” said Whitney Bouck, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “As a former CMO myself, I know that marketing is constantly challenged to provide true ROI on brand marketing. BlueOcean gives marketing leaders quantifiable and actionable insights on brand performance for the first time, which we know is game-changing.”
Last year, reports began circulating that Google was developing a “Switch to Android” app for iOS users looking to make the jump from iPhone to a smartphone running Google’s Android OS. Now that app has arrived. On Monday, Google quietly launched the Switch to Android app on the App Store in a number of global markets, including the U.S. As expected, the app promises to make the transition between mobile platforms easier to manage by helping users import their contacts, calendar, photos, and videos to their new Android phone.
The app also instructs users how to turn off Apple’s iMessage in order to get text messages on their new device and has them connect with iCloud to migrate their photo and video library to Android.
Image Credits: Google
Google’s Switch to Android website has not yet been updated to indicate the new app is available and the company hasn’t officially announced its launch. The app is also not appearing on Google’s developer page on the App Store or in App Store search results. It can only be found when clicking the direct link.
Currently, the Switch to Android website guides users through the standard process for moving to Android which involves users backing up their contacts, calendar, photos, and videos via the Google Drive iOS app before changing devices.
The company’s plan to develop a standalone app for iPhone-to-Android switchers was first uncovered last year, when the website 9to5Google dug into the code within Android’s official Data Restore Tool and spotted a reference to a Google-developed Switch to Android app for iOS. The site just last month noted the app appeared to have gained the ability automatically migrate a users’ photos and videos from iCloud to Google Photos, also based on mentions in another Android app’s code.
There have been other hints that Google has been working to make it easier for users to shift their media content to its own platform and services through backend developments. Recently, Google announced an update to the Google Photos app that offered a way for mobile device owners to copy over photos from rival cloud storage services, including iCloud, Facebook and others. Before, transfers had to originate from Facebook or iCloud, not from Google’s app itself.
Unfortunately, one thing Google’s new Switch to Android iOS app doesn’t help with is migrating a users’ applications. This is likely due to limitations as to what third-party apps can access on the user’s device. Apps aren’t supposed to scan the user’s iPhone to extract a list of all the other apps a user has installed, that is.
In its App Store description, the new app promotes its ability to handle moving users’ content between devices without the use of “fussy cables,” meaning the two phones don’t have to be physically linked together to complete the process, as an added perk.
Google’s app is arriving many years after Apple’s app that helped switch Android users to iPhone. Back in September 2015, Apple launchedits Move to iOS app for Android users which, notably, was its first app on Google Play (besides those from its acquisition Beats.). Similarly, its app helped to migrate users’ data including their Camera Roll, Messages, Google Account, Contacts, and Bookmarks.
The number of applications for international visas in the UK and elsewhere, in order to leave Russia, has exploded following the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s estimated that since February over 200,000 people have fled the country, with many observers calling it a “brain drain”. And while it’s possible to apply for normal visas abroad, the reality is of a slow and difficult process. At the same time, most countries now have professional visa programs based on talent – but even then, Visa lawyers can be notoriously slow and expensive.
Now a new startup hope to capitalize on this flight from Russia and former CIS states associated with the Putin regime.
London-based Immigram is an immigration platform for tech professionals and entrepreneurs that has now raised $500,000 in a funding round led by Xploration Capital. Also participating was Mikita Mikado, an Belarusian immigrant founder to the US and СEO of PandaDoc, Joint Journey Ventures, and a group of angel investors. Immigram is also backed by Hatchery, a startup incubator run by University College London.
Immigram’s idea is to build a B2B SaaS platform enabling employers to attract and retain international talent by guiding them through the entire relocation journey. This is from applying for a relevant visa to finding an apartment and getting a bank account. The platform claims to combine legal advice with tech-enabled processes to “automate immigration”.
Core to the idea is Immigram’s scoring system which is geared to the UK Global Talent Visa. Since launching earlier this year, Immigram says it has helped 150 clients relocate. This would likely be a lot slower via a traditional lawyer.
Immigram also providing a B2C solution. Unlike traditional law firms that charge by the hour, Immigram says it provides fixed pricing, costs 50% less, and issues refunds in case an application is unsuccessful. So far it says it’s been used by execs from Google, Meta, Twitter, Revolut, Bumble, and Yandex, as well as founders and alumni of Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars.
Immigram’s founders – Anastasia Mirolyubova and Mikhail Sharonov – who both relocated to the UK from Russia several years ago and came up with the idea which is based on the UK’s increasing focus on the business and technical aspects of applications rather than the legal aspects.
The United States might also soon introduce a similar option. In January 2022, the House Rules Committee introduced a bill that creates a temporary visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs.
“We are building the product around the immigrant, not a particular country. The global talent shortage amounts to 40 million skilled workers right now, and it’s already affecting the immigration laws and is pushing developed countries to establish new talent visa programs. Our goal is to build an end-to-end global mobility platform that will guide people through the entire journey and help them find a community of like-minded people anywhere,” said Anastasia Mirolyubova, CEO and co-founder at Immigram in a statement.
“We are now at a very particular moment in history when countries begin to compete for people. Immigram facilitates that process by helping professionals fully realize their ambition on a global scale,” added Igor Kim, Managing Partner at Xploration Capital.
Immigram will compete with companies like Jobbatical or Localyze, but these do not normally have access to CIS markets and concentrate mainly on EU-based labor.
Immigram is also now offering a special service to talented Ukrainian IT specialists to move to the UK via the Global Talent route.
Contact centers play a key part in call a company engages with customers, amounting to what is a $400 billion market globally. Today, a company that believes it can improve how agents work within them using AI is announcing a big round of funding. Observe.ai — which provides natural language tools to track voice and text conversations, and to provide coaching for subsequent engagements and to use the data for compliance and other reporting requirements — has raised $125 million, funding that it will be using to continue building out its technology and to move into more markets.
Its aim, said Swapnil Jain, the CEO of Observe.ai, is to target the “dreadful experiences” that tend to be the norm when it comes to contact center engagements.
The company has a number of large multinationals among its customers — it does not disclose which, but Jain cited a few major telecoms companies by name in our conversation, without confirming if they were actual customers. Those it does disclose on its site are smaller names like Kin, Beyond and Public Storage. The company said in March that ARR was up 150%, with customer interactions analyzed by its AI up 3x, and a 426% increase in AI-powered agent evaluations, with a 201% increase in AI-powered agent coaching sessions.
(It does not disclose hard revenue numbers so take percentages with a grain of salt…)
The funding is a Series C and has some notable investors in it. SoftBank Vision Fund is leading the round, with videoconferencing giant Zoom also participating, alongside previous investors Menlo Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and others. Observe.ai has now raised $213 million, and it is not disclosing valuation, but for some context, PitchBook notes that San Francisco-based Observe.ai was valued at $304 million in July 2020.
Zoom is a strategic investor in this round, but Jain declined to give details of what the two will be doing together, although he said that it was likely to be revealed in the next month or two. Recall that Zoom has had some big ambitions to crack into the contact center market for a while.
Zoom launched a new contact center solution in February 2022, although its attempt to acquire Five9, a big player in the space, for nearly $15 billion, fell through after the latter company’s shareholders rejected the offer. While there may still be some debate over whether customers, or indeed agents or businesses, want a lot of video engagement in calls, there are times when you might imagine that could be useful, such as in cases of technical support.
Observe.ai could bring into that mix a sweetener for would-be customers, in the form of intelligence that can be applied to voice-only interactions and those taking place over chat. But sounds like it might be moving into measuring sentiment and conversations over Zoom’s most famous medium, too:
“This will be a first for us, working with video analytics,” Jain said, although it’s too early to say what value we will get from analyzing all that.”
The contact center market is one of the noisiest when it comes to enterprise software and its adoption of AI. Anecdotally, I am not sure that TechCrunch covered a single contact center startup in the last several years that hasn’t leaned on talking about AI innovation to disrupt how it all works. (Gong.ai, Google, TalkDesk, and more are among those playing in this space.)
Observe.ai was incubated at Y Combinator (part of its Winter 2018 cohort) and has been around since 2017, and it believes it has been one of the leaders in this movement, not least in part because of team members like Jithendra Vepa, its chief machine learning scientist, who previously led the team at Samsung working on its AI assistant Bixby. “We are focused on AI accuracy,” said Jain, who co-founded the startup with Akash Singh (CTO) and Sharath Keshava (CRO).
One critical point in the approach that Observe.ai takes is that it sees itself as an augmentation, not replacement, for actual agents, a distinction that is shaping up to be a key point of differentiation between different AI approaches.
“There are going to be significant workflows when we speak about contact enters. We know there will be support but more than 40% of customers are using contact centers for sales processes now, too. When you are a buyer getting insurance, you want to get a human and trust.”
Part of the rationale for this large funding round is also to give the company some runway in the lead-up to what it is describing as “IPO readiness” although there is no timescale for how and when that might take place.
In the meantime, large backers are turning up for what appears to be a large opportunity today.
“Observe.AI has a transformative vision to deliver actionable and trustworthy AI that empowers digital-first businesses to create exceptional customer experiences”, said Priya Saiprasad, a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. “The company has built an intelligent, flexible platform with endless use cases, from healthcare companies seeking to enhance patient experience through to financial institutions aiming to boost revenue. We are thrilled to partner with Swapnil and the team to help them accelerate a paradigm shift within the contact center industry.”
An interesting new study of 1,759 iOS apps before and after Apple implemented a major privacy feature last year which required developers to ask permission to track app users — aka App Tracking Transparency (ATT) — has found the measure has made tracking more difficult by preventing the collection of the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), which can be used for cross-app user tracking.
However, the researchers found little change to tracking libraries baked into apps and also saw many apps still collecting tracking data despite the user having asked the apps not to be tracked.
Additionally, they found evidence of app makers engaging in privacy-hostile fingerprinting of users, through the use of server-side code, in a bid to circumvent Apple’s ATT — suggesting Cupertino’s move may be motivating a counter movement by developers to deploy other means to keep tracking iOS users.
“We even found a real-world example of Umeng, a subsidiary of the Chinese tech company Alibaba, using their server-side code to provide apps with a fingerprinting-derived cross-app identifier,” they write. “The use of fingerprinting is in violation of Apple’s policies, and raises questions around to what extent the company is able to enforce its policies. ATT might ultimately encourage a shift of tracking technologies behind the scenes, so that they are outside of Apple’s reach. In other words, Apple’s new rules might lead to even less transparency around tracking than we currently have, including for academic researchers.”
The research paper, which is entitled “Goodbye Tracking? Impact of iOS App Tracking Transparency and Privacy Labels”, is the work of four academics affiliated with the University of Oxford and a fifth independent U.S.-based researcher. It’s worth noting that it’s been published as a pre-print — meaning it has not yet been peer reviewed.
Note that this is still a pre-print, and there might be minor changes of the paper until publication.
We analysed two versions of 1,759 iOS apps from the UK App Store: one version from before iOS 14 and one that has been updated to comply with the new rules.
Another component of the study looked at the “privacy nutrition labels” Apple introduced to iOS at the end of 2020 — with the researchers concluding that these labels are often inaccurate.
Apple’s system, which aims to provide iOS users with an at-a-glance overview of how much data they’re giving up to use an app, requires app developers to self-declare how they process user data. And here the researchers found “notable discrepancies” between apps’ disclosed and actual data practices — which they suggest may be creating a false sense of security for consumers and misleading them over how much privacy they’re giving up to use an app.
“Our findings suggest that tracking companies, especially larger ones with access to large troves of first party, still track users behind the scenes,” they write in a section discussing how continued, consentless tracking may be reinforcing both the power of gatekeepers and the opacity of the mobile data ecosystem. “They can do this through a range of methods, including using IP addresses to link installation-specific IDs across apps and through the sign-in functionality provided by individual apps (e.g. Google or Facebook sign-in, or email address).
“Especially in combination with further user and device characteristics, which our data confirmed are still widely collected by tracking companies, it would be possible to analyse user behaviour across apps and websites (i.e. fingerprinting and cohort tracking). A direct result of the ATT could therefore be that existing power imbalances in the digital tracking ecosystem get reinforced.”
The paper may add fuel to arguments that try to pitch competition law against privacy rights as the paper’s authors suggests their findings back the view that Apple and other large companies have been able to increase their market power as a result of implementing measures like ATT which give users more agency over their privacy.
Apple was contacted for comment on the research paper but at the time of writing the company had not responded.
Competition authorities have already fielded a number of complaints over Apple’s ATT.
While a separate plan by Google to deprecate support for tracking cookies in its Chrome browser — and switch to alternative ad targeting technologies (which the tech giant has also said it will bring to Android devices) — has similarly been targeted for antitrust complaints in recent months.
As it stands, neither move by the pair of mobile gatekeepers, Apple’s ATT or Google’s self-styled “Privacy Sandbox”, has been outright blocked by competition regulators, although Google’s Sandbox plan remains under close monitoring in Europe following a U.K. antitrust intervention which led the company to offer a series of commitments over how it will develop the tech stack. The interventions have also very likely contributed to delaying Google’s original timeline.
The EU is also conducting a formal antitrust investigation of Google’s adtech, which includes probing the Sandbox plan — although, at the time it announced the investigation, it stressed that any decision would need to consider user privacy too, writing that it would “take into account the need to protect user privacy, in accordance with EU laws in this respect, such as the General Data Protection Regulation”, and emphasizing that: “Competition law and data protection laws must work hand in hand to ensure that display advertising markets operate on a level playing field in which all market participants protect user privacy in the same manner.”
Joint working by the U.K.’s competition (CMA) and privacy regulators (ICO) has also been the approach undertaken throughout the CMA’s Privacy Sandbox procedure. And in an opinion last year, the outgoing U.K. information commissioner told the adtech industry it needed to move away from tracking and profiling-based ad targeting — urging the development of alternative ad targeting technologies that don’t require processing people’s data.
In discussion in their research paper, the researchers go on to speculate that reduced access to permanent user identifiers as a result of Apple’s ATT could — over time — “substantially improve” app privacy, pointing exactly to these wider shifts underway to recast ad-targeting technologies (such as Google’s Sandbox) which claim to be better for privacy, although as the researchers also note those claims need to be interrogated — as having the potential to flip economic calculations away from privacy-hostile techniques like fingerprinting.
However they predict that this migration away from tracking is further concentrating the market power of platform gatekeepers.
“While in the short run, some companies might try to replace the IDFA with statistical identifiers, the reduced access to non-probabilistic cross-app identifiers might make it very hard for data brokers and other smaller tracker companies to compete. Techniques like fingerprinting and cohort tracking may end up not being competitive enough compared to more privacy-preserving, on-device solutions,” they suggest. “We are already seeing a shift of the advertising industry towards the adoption of such solutions, driven by decisions of platform gatekeepers (e.g. Google’s FloC / Topics API and Android Privacy Sandbox, Apple’s ATT and Privacy Nutrition Labels), though more discussion is needed if these new technologies protect privacy meaningfully.
“The net result, however, of this shift towards more privacy preserving methods is likely going to be more concentration with the existing platform gatekeepers, as the early reports on the tripled marketing share of Apple, the planned overhaul of advertising technologies by Facebook/Meta and others, and the shifting spending patterns of advertisers suggest. At the end of the day, advertising to iOS users — being some of the wealthiest individuals — will be an opportunity that many advertisers cannot miss out on, and so they will rely on the advertising technologies of the larger tech companies to continue targeting the right audiences with their ads.”
The paper also calls out the failure of European regulators and policymakers to crack down on tracking by enforcing privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), writing that: “[I]t is worrying that a few changes by a private company (Apple) seem to have changed data protection in apps more than many years of high-level discussion and efforts by regulators, policymakers and others. This highlights the relative power of these gatekeeper companies, and the failure of regulators thus far to enforce the GDPR adequately. An effective approach to increase compliance with data protection law and privacy protections in practice might be more targeted regulation of the gatekeepers of the app ecosystem; so far, there exists no targeted regulation in the US, UK and EU.”
Targeted regulation is coming down the pipe for internet gatekeepers, though. Albeit at a pace that’s orders of magnitude slower than the ads which get auctioned off and microtargeted at eyeballs every millisecond of every day.
The European Union reached political agreement on its flagship ex ante competition reform for gatekeepers, aka the Digital Markets Act, just last month — and lawmakers said then that they expect the regime to come into force in October. (Although it’s unlikely to really kick in until 2023 at the earliest and there’s already debate over whether the Commission has adequate resources to enforce against some of the world’s most valuable companies with their expanding armies of in-house lawyers.)
The U.K., meanwhile, has its own bespoke version of this sort of Big Tech competition reform. Its “pro-competition” regime was trailed back in 2020 but is still pending legislation to empower the Digital Markets Unit. And recent reports in the U.K. press have suggested the Digital Competition Bill won’t now be presented to parliament until next year — which would mean further delay.
Germany is ahead of the curve here, having passed a competition reform at the start of last year. It has also — earlier this year — identified Google as subject to this special abuse control regime. Although the country’s FCO still needs to complete the work of investigating the various Google products that are causing it competition concern. But it’s possible that we’ll see some gatekeeper targeted enforcements by the FCO this year.
Welcome Tech, a startup building a “Super App” aimed at immigrants,
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