A few months on from a tracking controversy hitting privacy-centric search veteran, DuckDuckGo, the company has announced it’s been able to amend terms with Microsoft, its search syndication partner, that had previously meant its mobile browsers and browser extensions were prevented from blocking advertising requests made by Microsoft scripts on third party sites.

In a blog post pledging “more privacy and transparency for DuckDuckGo web tracking protections”, founder and CEO, Gabe Weinberg, writes: “Over the next week, we will expand the third-party tracking scripts we block from loading on websites to include scripts from Microsoft in our browsing apps (iOS and Android) and our browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera), with beta apps to follow in the coming month.”

“This expands our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection, which blocks identified tracking scripts from Facebook, Google, and other companies from loading on third-party websites, to now include third-party Microsoft tracking scripts. This web tracking protection is not offered by most other popular browsers by default and sits on top of many other DuckDuckGo protections,” he added.

DDG claims this third party tracker loading protection is not offered by most other popular browsers by default.

“Most browsers’ default tracking protection focuses on cookie and fingerprinting protections that only restrict third-party tracking scripts after they load in your browser. Unfortunately, that level of protection leaves information like your IP address and other identifiers sent with loading requests vulnerable to profiling. Our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection helps address this vulnerability, by stopping most 3rd-party trackers from loading in the first place, providing significantly more protection,” Weinberg writes in the blog post.

“Previously, we were limited in how we could apply our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection on Microsoft tracking scripts due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results. We’re glad this is no longer the case. We have not had, and do not have, any similar limitation with any other company.”

“Microsoft scripts were never embedded in our search engine or apps, which do not track you,” he adds. “Websites insert these scripts for their own purposes, and so they never sent any information to DuckDuckGo. Since we were already restricting Microsoft tracking through our other web tracking protections, like blocking Microsoft’s third-party cookies in our browsers, this update means we’re now doing much more to block trackers than most other browsers.

Asked if DDG will be publishing its new contract with Microsoft, or whether it’s still bound by an NDA, Weinberg said: “Nothing else has changed and we don’t have other information to share on this.”

The carve-out for DDG’s search supplier was picked up in May via an independent audit conducted by privacy researcher, Zach Edwards.

At the time DDG ‘fessed up to anomaly but said it essentially had no choice to accept Microsoft’s terms, although it also said it wasn’t happy about the restriction and hoped to be able to remove it in the future.  

Asked whether the publicity generated by the controversy helped persuade the tech giant to relax the restriction on its ability to block Microsoft ad scripts on non-Microsoft sites, DDG referred us back to Microsoft.

When we put the same question to the tech giant a spokeswoman told us:

Microsoft has policies in place to ensure that we balance the needs of our publishers with the needs of our advertisers to accurately track conversions on our network. We have been partnering with DuckDuckGo to understand the implications of this policy and we are pleased to have arrived at a solution that addresses those concerns.

In a transparency-focused steps being announced today, DDG said it’s publishing its tracker protection list — available here on Github — although the company told us the information was available before but suggested it’s easier to find now.

It also sent us the following list of domains where it said it will be blocking Microsoft tracking requests:

• adnxs.com
• adnxs-simple.com
• adsymptotic.com
• adv-cloudfilse.azureedge.net
• app-fnsp-matomo-analytics-prod.azurewebsites.net
• azure.com
• azure.net
• bing.com
• cdnnwlive.azureedge.net
• clarity.ms
• dynamics.com
• fp-cdn.azureedge.net
• licdn.com
• linkedin.com
• live-tfs-omnilytics.azurewebsites.net
• msecnd.net
• nlo-stl-web.azureedge.net
• nuance.com
• pestcontrol-uc1.azureedge.net
• sdtagging.azureedge.net
• serviceschipotlecom.trafficmanager.net

Despite this expansion of DDG’s ability to block Microsoft tracking requests, there are still instances where Microsoft ad scripts are not blocked by DDG’s tools by default — related to processes used by advertisers to track conversions (i.e. to determine whether an ad click actually led to a purchase).

“To evaluate whether an ad on DuckDuckGo is effective, advertisers want to know if their ad clicks turn into purchases (conversions). To see this within Microsoft Advertising, they use Microsoft scripts from the bat.bing.com domain,” explains Weinberg in the blog post. “Currently, if an advertiser wants to detect conversions for their own ads that are shown on DuckDuckGo, 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection will not block bat.bing.com requests from loading on the advertiser’s website following DuckDuckGo ad clicks, but these requests are blocked in all other contexts. For anyone who wants to avoid this, it’s possible to disable ads in DuckDuckGo search settings.

DDG says it wants to go further to protect user privacy around ad conversion tracking — but admits this won’t happen any time soon. In the blog post Weinberg writes that “eventually” it wants to be able to replace the current process for ad conversions checks by migrating to a new architecture for assessing ad effectiveness privately.

“To eventually replace the reliance on bat.bing.com for evaluating ad effectiveness, we’ve started working on an architecture for private ad conversions that can be externally validated as non-profiling,” he says.

DDG is by no means alone here. Across the industry, all sorts of moves are afoot to evolve/rethink adtech infrastructure in response to privacy backlash — and to rising regulatory risk attached to individual tracking — efforts such as Google’s multi-year push to replace support for tracking cookies in Chrome with an alternative adtech stack (aka its ‘Privacy Sandbox’ proposal; which remains a (delayed) work in progress).

“DuckDuckGo isn’t alone in trying to solve this issue; Safari is working on Private Click Measurement (PCM) and Firefox is working on Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA). We hope these efforts can help move the entire digital ad industry forward to making privacy the default,” adds Weinberg. “We think this work is important because it means we can improve the advertising-based business model that countless companies rely on to provide free services, making it more private instead of throwing it out entirely.”

Asked about the timeline for developing such an infrastructure, he says: “We don’t have a timeline to share right now but it’s not an imminent announcement.”

Despite DDG’s assertion that viewing ads via its browsers is “anonymous”, its ad disclosure page confirms that it passes some personal data (IP address and user string) to Microsoft, its ad partner — for “accounting purposes” (aka “to charge the advertiser and pay us for proper clicks, which includes detection of improper clicks”, as Weinberg puts it).

“Per our ad page, Microsoft has committed [that] “when you click on a Microsoft-provided ad that appears on DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Advertising does not associate your ad-click behavior with a user profile. It also does not store or share that information other than for accounting purposes,” he says when pressed on what guarantees he has from Microsoft that user data passed for ad conversions doesn’t end up being repurposed for broader tracking and profiling of individuals.

In back and forth with TechCrunch, DDG also repeatedly emphasizied that its policy states that Microsoft does not link this data to a behavioral profile (or, indeed, share a user’s actual IP address etc).

However Weinberg concedes there are limits on how much control DDG can have over what happens to data once it’s passed — given, for example, the adtech ecosystem’s penchant for sharing (and synching) pseudonymized identifiers (e.g. hashes of identifiers) in order that digital activity may still be linked back to individual profiles, say after a few hops through a chain of third party data processors/enrichers, and thereby removing an earlier privacy screen… So, tl;dr, trying to shield your users’ privacy from prying third parties whilst operating in an ad ecosystem that’s been designed for pervasive surveillance (and allowed to sprawl all over the place) remains a massive firefight. 

“Staying anonymous ‘through the adtech ecosystem’ is a different story because once someone clicks on a site (whether or not they got there through DuckDuckGo search), they become subject to the website owner’s privacy policy and related practices,” Weinberg admits. “In our browsers, we try to limit that through our web privacy protections but we cannot control what the website owner (the ‘first party’) does, which could be sharing data with third-parties in the ad tech ecosystem.”

“The ad disclosure page makes clear viewing ads is anonymous and further covers ad clicks, which has a commitment from Microsoft to not profile users on ad click, which includes any behavioral profiling by them or others. This commitment includes not passing that data on to anyone,” DDG also claims.

“Our privacy policy states that viewing all search results (including ads) is anonymous, and Microsoft Advertising (or anyone else) does not get anything that can de-anonymize user searches at that time (including full IP address) in terms of being able to tie individual searches to individuals or together into a search history,” it adds.

In further developments being highlighted by the company today, DDG said it’s updated the Privacy Dashboard that’s displayed in its apps and extensions — to show “more information” about third-party requests, per its blog post.

“Using the updated Privacy Dashboard, users can see which third-party requests have been blocked from loading and which other third-party requests have loaded, with reasons for both when available,” Weinberg writes on that.

It has also relaunched its help page — with a promise that the overhauled content offers “a comprehensive explanation of all the web tracking protections we provide across platforms”.

“Users now have one place to look if they want to understand the different kinds of web privacy protections we offer on the platforms they use. This page also explains how different web tracking protections are offered based on what is technically possible on each platform, as well as what’s in development for this part of our product roadmap,” its blog post suggests.

Microsoft is being called out for blocking users of the end-to-end encrypted email service, Tutanota, from registering an account with its cloud-based collaboration platform, Teams, if they try to do that using a Tutanota email address.

The problem, which has been going on unrectified for some time — with an initial complaint raised with Microsoft support back in January 2021 — appears to have arisen because it treats Tutanota as a corporate email, rather than what it actually is (and has always been), an email service.

This misclassification means that when a Tutanota email user tries to use this email address to register an account with Teams they get a classic ‘computer says no’ response — with the interface blocking the registration and suggesting the person “contact your admin or try a different email”.

“When the first Tutanota user registered a Teams account, they were assigned the domain. That’s why now everyone who logs in with Tutanota address should report to their ‘admin’ (see screenshot),” explains a spokeswoman for Tutanota when asked why they think this is happening.

Screengrab: Tutanota

To get past this denial — and register a Teams account — the Tutanota user has to enter a non-Tutanota email. (Such as, for example, a Microsoft email address.)

Unsurprisingly, Tutanota is crying foul over Microsoft’s failure to fix an obvious SNAFU — and urging action from antitrust authorities to ensure that competition generally, and pro-privacy business models like its own, are not harmed by over powerful, gatekeeping tech giants failing to provide a level playing field.

In a blog post detailing the saga, Tutanota co-founder, Matthias Pfau, dubs Microsoft’s behavior a “severe anti-competitive practice”.

“Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are discussing stronger antitrust legislation to regulate Big Tech. These laws are badly needed as the example of Microsoft blocking Tutanota users from registering a Teams account demonstrates,” he writes. “The problem: Big Tech companies have the market power to harm smaller competitors with some very easy steps like refusing smaller companies’ customers from using their own services.”

“This is just one example of how Microsoft can and does abuse its dominant market position to harm competitors, which in turn also harms consumers,” he adds.

The German company behind Tutatnota was founded all the way back in 2011, going on to launch its encrypted email client in 2014 — so Microsoft can’t exactly be accused of having its finger on the pulse here.

But Tutanota says that when it asked he company’s support staff to fix the problem they’d created they were told it simply wasn’t “feasible”.

“We have reviewed this internally and as of now, it is currently not feasible for the domain to become a public domain and this is because the domain has used the Microsoft Teams services,” wrote Microsoft support staff in one unhelpful email response to Tutanota which TechCrunch has reviewed.

“As earlier discussed, we are unable to make your domain a public domain. The domain has already been used for Microsoft Teams. If teams have been used with a specific domain, it can’t work as a vanity/public domain,” runs another of Microsoft’s support’s shrugging-off responses.

Tutanota kept on trying to press for a reason why Microsoft could not reclassify the domain for weeks — but just hit the same brick wall denial. Hence it’s going public with its complaint now.

“The conversation went back and forth for at lest six weeks until we finally gave up — due to the repeated response that they would not change this,” the spokeswoman added.

In the blog post, Pfau goes on to argue that “competing with Microsoft is nigh impossible given their sheer market power”, and urges authorities to “break up the market power of Big Tech” — highlighting the contrast between a pro-privacy end-to-end encrypted email service, such as Tutanota, and a tech giant like Microsoft which has a big adtech business that’s fuelled by tracking web users, stripping them of privacy to monetize targeted advertising.

“We need to break up the market power of Big Tech like we did in the nineties. This will lead to a new evolution in today’s online world. One where products rise that concentrate on benefiting the consumer – not maximizing ad revenue,” he writes, adding: “To free oneself from being tracked online, people need privacy-respecting alternatives.”

Microsoft was contacted about Tutanota’s complaint but at the time of writing the tech giant had not provided a response.

It’s not the first time Tutanota has found its users’ access being blocked by larger platforms, having previously experienced issues with AT&T and Comcast in the US.

Since then, the European Union has passed sweeping new antitrust legislation that’s set to start applying from early next year — aka the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — which will set up front rules for the most powerful platforms (so called “gatekeepers”) to pro-actively push them to play fair by other businesses, backed up by a regime of major penalties for violations.

Cloud services are in scope of the DMA — and the regulation also includes a requirement that in-scope core platform services must apply fair and non-discriminatory general conditions of access (aka FRAND terms), among a long list of other operational ‘dos and don’ts’ — so Microsoft’s Teams platform could, potentially, be in the frame for the EU’s incoming special abuse regime to apply to it in the future.

That said, EU lawmakers have previously suggested Microsoft is unlikely to be first GAFAM giant to qualify for the bloc’s shiny new ex ante oversight rules, given how wide-spread competition concerns are when it comes to the full spectrum of Big Tech (i.e. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple etc). But the bloc’s direction of travel is now firmly for increased scrutiny of platform power, and on the fairness of its impacts, so Microsoft’s dismissive attitude toward Tutanota’s complaint looks ill-advised, to say the least.

An innovative new medical startup in Romania helped doctors from three countries collaborate to treat Ukrainian cancer patients made refugees after Russia’s brutal invasion.

The “Tumor Board” project was initiated by doctors from the US, Romania and Moldova to provide life saving treatments for displaced Ukrainians with cancer.

A collaboration of Heal 21 Association and Blue Heron Foundation, the Board used a platform provided by Romanian startup Medicai to connect doctors, share medical files, and provide a platform to discuss treatment plans, as well as allow the patients to track their own progress.

Starting in April, imaging of the cancer patients from Ukraine was uploaded (those who had it) and the new imaging from Moldava were translated from Ukrainian to Romanian/English, and reports were prepared for each patient.

Medicai, which has raised €1.2M in venture funding to date, says its web based HIPAA-compliant platform hopes to become a sort of “Miro for health”, allowing healthcare professionals to collaborate over patient documents and records.

The problem Medicai is solving sounds familiar. For example, to this day, patients go into a $1 million MRI machine and – generally speaking – walk out with a CD disk with an image of their knee or some other part of their body. It’s just one example of how data can be siloed and how patients are usually locked into large, centralized systems. This means medical professionals can’t easily collaborate with specialists outside of their hospitals.

Established corporates selling these centralized systems include BoxDICOM, Ambra Health and amongst the startups there is EnvoyAI and Collective Minds Radiology (raised $6.7M), among others.

Medicai founder Mircea Popa’s journey in healthcare started in 2011 when, with a friend of his, he co-founded a company that is now called SkinVision, a skin cancer screening app that detects melanoma (skin cancer) through ML algorithms applied on images taken with smartphones. SkinVision reached 1.2 million downloads and raised a total of $15 million in total. Medicai Co-founder Alexandru Artimon (CTO) previously co-founded software company Atta Systems.

Popa told me via email: “One lesson we’ve learned lately about healthcare is that we desperately need flexibility. With the Tumor Board project we’ve shown that Medicai can set up infrastructure in a matter of days to provide access to expertise across 2 continents: US & Canada to Romania and Moldavia – and this was done in less than ideal conditions.”

“Through the Tumor Board project we were able to touch the lives of oncological patients that would have had no other option in seeking treatment and we’re really proud to be a part of that,” he added.

So far Medicai says it has reached 29 paying clinics/hospitals, with 2,434 doctors accounts and 1400 patients accounts. It’s also claimed a strategic partnership with Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies.

Investors to date include D Moonshots, Cleverage Venture Capital, Roca X and Gapminder VC.

Meanwhile the Tumor Board project continues. If there are the predicted four million Ukrainian refugees arriving in the coming months, there could be between 13,000 and 16,000 new patients with cancer per month arriving in countries bordering Ukraine.

Microsoft today added two new features to its Microsoft Defender security platform: Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management. These features are based on the company’s acquisition of RiskIQ and with this launch, Microsoft is now bringing some of RiskIQ’s core features to its own security platform (all while RiskIQ continues to operate its own services, too).

“Our mission is to build a safer world for all — and threat intelligence is [at] the heart of it,” Microsoft’s Vasu Jakkal told me. “If you don’t know what’s happening in the world around you, it’s very hard to understand what to do about it and how to act on it. Microsoft has the largest breadth and depth of threat signals today — we are tracking, as we just announced in our earnings, 43 trillion signals [each day] which we see from identities, from devices, from platforms, from email, collab tools.”

With Defender Threat Intelligence, Microsoft is using RiskIQ’s technology to scan the internet and provide additional data to the existing Defender real-time service to help security teams proactively secure their infrastructure. Microsoft, of course, already had a large signal map to power its Defender platform, but Jakkal noted that RiskIQ’s data not only helps enrich this existing data set but also enables an additional layer on top of Defender that gives security teams a view of the entire attack chain.

“They can see the entire attack chain, they can act on it and then — combined with their own human intelligence —– they can see where the attack is going and how to proactively prevent it,” Jakkal explained.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The service also provides users with a library of raw threat intelligence and analysis from Microsoft’s security experts, which in turn should help security teams find, remove and block adversary tools that may be hidden within their organization.

Meanwhile, the new external attack surface management service helps these security teams understand how a potential attacker sees their network. Like similar services, it provides security teams with a way to discover all of their resources and find those that are unknown and/or unmanaged. Most businesses that start using a service like this end up being surprised by how many internet-facing unmanaged assets they find.

Image Credits: Microsoft

“All organizations are asking the question: how secure am I? It’s such a simple question but it’s so hard to answer that question. Because the first point is, well, first we need to understand what’s happening in the world of threats. And we need to understand what that looks like. The second thing we need to understand is where our resources are,” Jakkal noted. With these new tools, Microsoft is giving security teams more data to work with to protect their networks and other assets.

Windows 11, Microsoft’s latest operating system for personal computers and tablets, comes with a lot of features. But it can be even better with a little bit of customization. In this blog post, we will show you how to personalize your Windows 11 devices so you can make the most of its many features.

Tweak the Taskbar

On Windows 11, the Taskbar is located at the center of the screen. If you prefer the old layout, you can simply right-click anywhere on the Taskbar to access Taskbar settings. From there, click on Taskbar behaviors > Taskbar alignment > Left.

If you want to further customize the Taskbar settings, you can also try using Taskbar11. With Taskbar11, you can move the Taskbar to the top of your screen, instead of just to the left or center, and even change the sizes of the icons on the Taskbar.

Organize with Fences

With its many features and customization options, Fences is a great way to personalize your Windows 11 experience. It lets you easily create resizable frames where you can place custom categories for your files and folders right on your desktop. Fences also allows you to add shortcuts to your favorite programs so you can quickly access them without having to search through the Start menu.

Fences lets you put files or programs within customizable frames that you can roll up in a mini-window. This way, you can have a more organized and less cluttered desktop.

Search with PowerToys Run

If you’re in a hurry and want the easiest way to access specific programs or files, you can use PowerToys Run. Installing PowerToys Run allows you to quickly access the search function. Simply press the Alt and Space shortcut keys, and a search bar will appear on your screen. This feature eliminates the need to dig through the menus, saving you precious time. You can download PowerToys Run here.

Whether you want to make a bold statement or simply make your computer more comfortable to use, personalization is the key. So go ahead and experiment with different settings until you find the perfect combination for you. And if you have any questions about Windows 11, feel free to contact us and our experts will be happy to guide you.

Windows 11 is packed with new features and customization options. Whether you want to add some aesthetic elements to your desktop, change it back to that familiar Windows look, or simply tweak certain settings, you can customize the operating system based on your preferences. In this blog, we will discuss some of the best ways to personalize your Windows 11 experience.

Tweak the Taskbar

On Windows 11, the Taskbar is located at the center of the screen. If you prefer the old layout, you can simply right-click anywhere on the Taskbar to access Taskbar settings. From there, click on Taskbar behaviors > Taskbar alignment > Left.

If you want to further customize the Taskbar settings, you can also try using Taskbar11. With Taskbar11, you can move the Taskbar to the top of your screen, instead of just to the left or center, and even change the sizes of the icons on the Taskbar.

Organize with Fences

With its many features and customization options, Fences is a great way to personalize your Windows 11 experience. It lets you easily create resizable frames where you can place custom categories for your files and folders right on your desktop. Fences also allows you to add shortcuts to your favorite programs so you can quickly access them without having to search through the Start menu.

Fences lets you put files or programs within customizable frames that you can roll up in a mini-window. This way, you can have a more organized and less cluttered desktop.

Search with PowerToys Run

If you’re in a hurry and want the easiest way to access specific programs or files, you can use PowerToys Run. Installing PowerToys Run allows you to quickly access the search function. Simply press the Alt and Space shortcut keys, and a search bar will appear on your screen. This feature eliminates the need to dig through the menus, saving you precious time. You can download PowerToys Run here.

Whether you want to make a bold statement or simply make your computer more comfortable to use, personalization is the key. So go ahead and experiment with different settings until you find the perfect combination for you. And if you have any questions about Windows 11, feel free to contact us and our experts will be happy to guide you.

Windows 11 comes with a lot of great features, but one of the best ones is that it’s highly customizable. So whether you’ve just upgraded to Windows 11 or have been using it for a while, read on for our tips on how to tailor it according to your preferences.

Tweak the Taskbar

On Windows 11, the Taskbar is located at the center of the screen. If you prefer the old layout, you can simply right-click anywhere on the Taskbar to access Taskbar settings. From there, click on Taskbar behaviors > Taskbar alignment > Left.

If you want to further customize the Taskbar settings, you can also try using Taskbar11. With Taskbar11, you can move the Taskbar to the top of your screen, instead of just to the left or center, and even change the sizes of the icons on the Taskbar.

Organize with Fences

With its many features and customization options, Fences is a great way to personalize your Windows 11 experience. It lets you easily create resizable frames where you can place custom categories for your files and folders right on your desktop. Fences also allows you to add shortcuts to your favorite programs so you can quickly access them without having to search through the Start menu.

Fences lets you put files or programs within customizable frames that you can roll up in a mini-window. This way, you can have a more organized and less cluttered desktop.

Search with PowerToys Run

If you’re in a hurry and want the easiest way to access specific programs or files, you can use PowerToys Run. Installing PowerToys Run allows you to quickly access the search function. Simply press the Alt and Space shortcut keys, and a search bar will appear on your screen. This feature eliminates the need to dig through the menus, saving you precious time. You can download PowerToys Run here.

Whether you want to make a bold statement or simply make your computer more comfortable to use, personalization is the key. So go ahead and experiment with different settings until you find the perfect combination for you. And if you have any questions about Windows 11, feel free to contact us and our experts will be happy to guide you.

When the Big 3 cloud infrastructure vendors – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – reported their earnings this week, it was clear that the cloud is helping keep their overall numbers up. But perhaps what was most surprising was that after years of sitting at 33% market share, AWS was up a tick to 34% in the second quarter, according to numbers from Synergy Research.

Even more surprising is that after years of steady market share growth, Microsoft was down a notch from 22% last quarter to 21% this quarter. Google came in third, holding steady around 10%.

Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale said the slight drop in Microsoft’s market share is probably due to the law of large numbers — Microsoft couldn’t sustain its recent growth.

“The days of Azure growing by 50% to 80% year on year are over. Once you get to a certain scale, it is virtually impossible to organically grow at such high rates. So its growth rates have trended down, as they had to. AWS experienced the same phenomenon a long time before Azure got there. Despite the Q2 changes in market share that you saw in our article, Azure’s rolling annualized growth rate does remain quite a bit higher than AWS,” Dinsdale told TechCrunch.

But he said that AWS’ ability to continue to grow at the rate it has is nothing short of remarkable.

After Snap’s poorly received Q1 digest and ahead of this week’s string of earnings reports from the largest U.S. tech companies, we wondered whether the advertising market is in trouble. Not that most folks associate Microsoft or Apple with advertising the way they may with Alphabet or Meta, but the majors — Amazon and Apple included — have ads businesses of material size, meaning that the ad market impacts each of them.

(That ads are considered to be a lackluster business model for smaller companies and startups — speaking loosely — but are a huge revenue source for platform companies says something interesting about competition inside of the technology industry. But perhaps that’s a topic for another day.)

Now, with three of the five majors having reported their Q2 results, how are their advertising results faring?

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The question ripples into other areas of the economy: Tech companies generate huge incomes from hosting advertisements, but with companies as far afield as Netflix working hard to bolster their subscription incomes through ads, the question of advertising performance is not idle, and impacts trillions of dollars of corporate value.

Patent trolling, critics say, is guided by one principle alone: money. Yet tackling it remains a complex task with many angles. Today, a consortium called LOT — set up to help improve how the tech world, and the IP industry at large, handle trolling — is launching a new front in its efforts. It’s formed a new group called Adapt, an acronym for Advancing Diversity Across Patent Teams, with a mission to identify DEI issues in the IP industry and build programs to address them.

There is a specific but potentially very effective thread that links the worlds of diversity and inclusion with that of intellectual property.

DEI is a strong theme in the world of tech, which has traditionally not been great at inclusivity and has been making efforts to set that on a better course. The legal world is equally problematic on that front. As a result, the world of patent litigation acts almost like a force multiplier: you typically need engineering (or other scientific or technical) degrees as well as law degrees to practice IP law, Microsoft assistant general counsel Judy Yee — who is involved in Adapt — said in an interview, resulting in a even smaller subsets out of already-small diversity pools.

Case in point, research from the American Bar Association from 2020 found that 22% of patent attorneys and agents are women, 6.5% are racially diverse, and just 1.7% are racially diverse women.

The benefits of improving those ratios are of course important just as a matter of doing what is right and equitable for all people, and giving not just more opportunities but more people the knowledge and empowerment to realize those opportunities. As with the tech industry’s wish to become more inclusive, it’s about putting people in places to make decisions and build things for audiences that are diverse, too. Representing that at the point of service building and provision is critical in making sure that products are fit for that purpose.

Adapt believes that the same goes for the intellectual property industry.

“The reality is that with inclusive innovation, when we pull people in from marginalized communities, we create the best ideas and values and products,” said Micheal Binns, who is associate general counsel at Meta overseeing patent portfolio strategy for Meta’s Family of Apps (which refers to Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp), and is also working on the Adapt project.

LOT’s interest in bringing this about comes partly from the fact that it’s one of the relatively rare instances of cooperation and collaboration between companies that might otherwise compete fiercely against each other — and might at some point find themselves in IP disputes of their own although these are considered separate from troll activities run by so-called patent enforcement agents, businesses set up with the primary purpose of amassing patents and then going after companies that they believe violate them in order to win settlements. That, plus the organization’s wish simply to do better in its own realm, gives it a unique place to advocate for programs that can have larger ramifications.

The group will be kicking off its first activities starting in September. They will include building a database of DEI programs and a directory for volunteer and sponsorship activities from DEI organizations: the idea here is to give companies keen to build more DEI initiatives access to outside resources to do so. It will also run a mentorship program aimed at underrepresented IP professionals specifically. Lastly, it will be building a platform and forum for measuring DEI analytics and sharing knowledge related to that.

Initially, Yee noted, Adapt will be focused on the legal aspect of IP — that is, organizations’ attorneys and wider teams working in patent law — but clearly there is an opportunity also to extend that to inventors, those building products and bringing them to legal teams to help secure IP claims.

“We decided for the first phase to focus on the patent profession, but a lot of our efforts bleed into that space,” she said of technical professionals, inventors and those whose aspirations might lead them into that area. “There is a pipeline.”

Patent trolls were a very regular presence in the landscape of technology a decade or so ago, and although you may not hear about patent cases every day nowadays, they are definitely not disappearing.

“Patent trolls are on the rise,” Ken Seddon, the CEO of LOT who previously worked for companies like Apple, Intel and ARM in patent litigation. He cites the currently tough economic climate, with inflation on the rise and the effects of the pandemic leading those who might hold IP assets to make more efforts to enforce them, or more often sell them off to PAEs (patent enforcement entities, the more euphemistic name for trolls), who are in turn making moves to enforce them against operating technology companies.

“The Supreme Court, White House and Congress have far bigger issues to deal with today, so my sense is that they may have given up on patent reform for the high tech industry.” But groups like LOT seem to paint a picture for why that may merit rethinking: it’s picked up 1,200 new members since February 2021, Seddon said, with companies including behemoths like TikTok owner ByteDance but also a lot of much smaller companies.

And that feeds well into the mission both at LOT and Adapt:

“We wanted to demystify that you need to be a large company to tackle diversity,” Binns said. And by that logic, the push for more inclusion will also play into helping fight IP abuse and misuse.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest and most interesting technology, startup and markets news. Sitting as we are on the precipice of a huge data dump, we had lots to chat through!

• Stocks are mixed around the world, while crypto selloff modestly after some recovery gains. In general, the value of securities are down in recent weeks and months, and now, frankly, quarters.
• This is Earnings Week: Yes, friends, get ready to hear from Alphabet and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft and Apple. The Big Five are reporting this week, providing us a glimpse into the health of a host of businesses. Recall that we have seen the major slow hiring lately, perhaps a harbinger of the (meager) feast to come?
• Cartona is building something neat in Egypt, TechCrunch reports. And there is still venture capital money flowing in China, despite, you know, all the stuff going on there.
• Zomato is sinking, Voyager is biting the hand that wants to feed it at least a little, and it turns out that the grocery delivery war is only heating up.

No live show this week, just three episodes! Hang in there we got you!

Once seemingly unstoppable, big tech is now in reset mode.

We’re not talking about Snap’s earnings sending its stock plunging, or Twitter’s lackluster earnings report from earlier this morning. No, we’re talking about big tech. The world’s largest tech companies are pulling back in a way that could, perhaps, clear some brush for startups still making their way through the wild (the private markets) towards the promised land (the public markets).

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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This is good news for smaller companies, which were long irked at the sheer amount of cash the Googles and Microsofts of the world could throw at potential hires, some of whom came from smaller, more financially-constrained startups.

But as with most good news, there’s a catch.