On-demand delivery app Glovo is spinning up a b2b logistics unit for super speedy urban delivery

Spain’s on-demand delivery app, Glovo, is gearing up to be able to deliver a much wider range of products within a 30-minute timeframe by rolling out a b2b logistics play — drawing on a network of city centre warehouses that it plans to massively expand over the next twelve months.

It’s just announced the launch of a new business unit, called Q-Commerce — the ‘Q’ standing for quick — to accelerate development of a b2b service that will see it offer to stock third parties’ products in its warehouses and have the couriers that operate on its on-demand platform make deliveries for other businesses too — offering what it bills as a “turn-key” logistics solution for businesses of all sizes to underpin their own online stories. 

It is already working with retail brands like Unilever, Nestle and L’Oreal and supermarkets including Walmart, Carrefour and Kaufland to stock and sell their goods from its network of so-called ‘dark stores’ — which are currently located in Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon and Milan — offering users there speedy delivery for selected groceries and other items under its ‘Glovo Market’ brand (currently with the carrot of free 24-hour delivery and no minimum spend). But it’s aiming to ramp up across the board — expanding the reach of its Glovo Market offer to more cities and launching a b2b offer to power others’ online stores — saying it plans to have more than 100 dark stores up and running by the end of 2021.

Commenting in a statement, Daniel Alonso, global director of Q-Commerce at Glovo — and former ecommerce director at Walmart — said: “With shops closing down and lockdowns globally, consumers now want and expect more items than ever to be delivered to their doorstep. With this has brought new demands — it is no longer a case of waiting 24-48 hours for a delivery. Rather, the expectation for this is now a matter of minutes. At Glovo we’re committed to thirty minutes or less with all products available on Q-Commerce. As we continue to expand our enhanced offering, we’re excited to launch Q-Commerce in other parts of Spain and the rest of Europe, Eastern Europe and Africa over the next 12 months.”

Glovo says it wants Q-Commerce to power delivery of a wide range of products — not just meals and food from restaurants and supermarkets but anything sold in toy, music, book, flower, beauty and pharmacy stores.

There are some obvious gaps in that list: Clothes and shoe stores, for example, which are more likely to have their own online shopping infrastructure already. Plus clothes shopping is also more complex — given the propensity for returns when items don’t fit or suit. But it looks like Glovo is going after almost everything else.

It says its Glovo Market service has more than 50,000 active users, at this point — touting the delivery of around two orders every minute. It also says it’s delivered more than 12 million “multi-category” orders globally to date, while in Spain the number of orders for grocery items doubled this year to more than 1 million. Its overall growth rate in 2019 was more than 300% year-on-year, it added.

The Deliveroo and Uber Eats rival has always touted itself as a ‘deliver everything’ app because it offers the option for users to request anything (within bike-able reason) be brought to your door by one of its gigging couriers, even though the majority of the business involves biking fast food around cities.

Meal deliveries were making up three-quarters of its revenues at the start of this year — but Glovo has ambitions to beat Amazon at the urban convenience game of delivering all sorts of stuff really, really fast. And it’s got investors on board with the plan. Last year it raised a $169M Series D and a $166M Series E in quick succession.

It’s further beefed up its balance sheet this (pandemic) year by offloading its LatAm ops — selling them to European rival Delivery Hero for $272M — which means it’s concentrating its market focus on Southern and Eastern Europe (it also has a small footprint in sub-Saharan Africa, in Kenya and Ivory Coast).

Presumably it sees that footprint as a better fit for the ‘get stuff now’ convenience push it’s making with Q-Commerce combined with a network of its own city center warehouses (aka dark stores). Though last year it also said it wanted to work on building a path toward profitability over the next year+ so fierce competition in LatAm may have pushed those markets out of reach.

Glovo says it has more than 9 million monthly active users, at this point — and 55,000 “associated partners” globally; aka the gig workers who do the heavy lifting of making actual deliveries for its platform.

The startup is facing ongoing legal uncertainty in its home market over its classification of ‘glovers’ (as it calls couriers) as ‘self-employed’. Spain’s supreme court recently found a rider to be in a laboural relationship with the platform — and any move to force the business to reclassify the thousands of couriers it relies upon in the country would radically rework its push for profitability, to put it mildly.

Spain’s top court rejects Glovo’s classification of couriers as self-employed

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/12/on-demand-delivery-app-glovo-is-spinning-up-a-b2b-logistics-unit-for-super-speedy-urban-delivery/

Europe lays out antitrust case against Amazon’s use of big data

The European Commission has laid out a first set of antitrust charges against Amazon focused on its dual role as a platform for other sellers but also a retailer itself on its own platform — and its cumulative use of third party merchant data to underpin Amazon’s own retail decisions.

Competition chief Margrethe Vestager said its preliminary conclusion is the ecommerce giant has abused its market position in France and Germany, its biggest markets in the EU, via its use of big data to “illegally distort” competition into online retail markets.

“We do not take issue with the success of Amazon. Or its size. Our concern is very specific business conduct which appears to distort genuine competition,” she said at a press conference announcing the formal charges.

The action stems from a 2015 sectoral ecommerce enquiry carried out by the bloc’s competition division. The Commission subsequently announced a formal investigation of Amazon’s use of data from sellers on its platform in July last year, though it had begun looking into concerns about whether third party sellers were being placed at a data-disadvantage by the ecommerce giant as far back as 2018.

As part of the investigation, EU regulators obtained a massive data set from Amazon — covering over 80M transactions and more than 100M product listings on its European marketplaces — to analyse how its business uses merchant data.

“Amazon is data driven. It’s a highly automated company — where business decisions are based on algorithmic tools,” said Vestager. “Our investigation shows that very granular, real-time business data relating to third party sellers’ listings and transactions on the Amazon platform systematically feed into the algorithm of Amazon’s retail business. It is based on these algorithms that Amazon decides what new products to launch, the price of each individual offer, the management of inventories, and the choice of the best supplier for a product.”

The competition chief said its preliminary concern is thus that third party sellers are unable to compete on the merits as a result of the big data advantage Amazon gleans from its access to third party sellers’ data.

“Amazon has, for example, access to data on the number of ordered and shipped units of sellers’ products, revenues on the marketplace, the number of visits to sellers’ offers, information relating to shipping — including the past performance of the seller, the consumers’ claims on the sellers’ products including the activated guarantees. And Amazon gets this data from every seller, every listed product, every purchase on its platform,” she said. “Our concern is not about Amazon retail — about the insights that Amazon retail has into the sensitive business data of one particular seller. Rather they are about the insights that Amazon retail has about the accumulated business data of more than 800,000 active sellers in the European Union covering more than 1BN products.

“In other words this is a case about big data.”

Vestager said the investigation has shown Amazon is able to aggregate and combine individual seller data in real time and to draw what she described as “precise and targeted” conclusions from it.

That capability gives is a huge advantage over individual sellers on its platform who do not have access to the same level of big data to help their business decisions, is the contention.

“Many retailers will have to invest heavily to identify products of interest and bring them to the consumers — taking risks when they invest in new products or when choosing a specific price level. Our concern is that Amazon can avoid some of those risks by using the data that it has access to,” added Vestager.

Reached for comment on the charges, an Amazon spokesperson sent this statement:

We disagree with the preliminary assertions of the European Commission and will continue to make every effort to ensure it has an accurate understanding of the facts. Amazon represents less than 1% of the global retail market, and there are larger retailers in every country in which we operate. No company cares more about small businesses or has done more to support them over the past two decades than Amazon. There are more than 150,000 European businesses selling through our stores that generate tens of billions of Euros in revenues annually and have created hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Amazon will now have a chance to respond to the charges, after which the Commission will assess the evidence and take a decision on whether it believes there has been an infringement of EU competition law. If it believes there has it has the power to order an end to infringing conduct and impose a fine of up to 10% of a company’s annual worldwide turnover.

In the two markets EU regulators found Amazon to be dominant, with more than 70% of consumers in France and more than 80% in Germany who made online purchases bought something from Amazon in the last 12 months.

Vestager specified the Commission is defining the market as “platforms providing marketplace services” rather than more general retail.

Also today, the commissioner announced a second competition investigation into Amazon — this one focused on the Buy Box and Prime loyalty program. Vestager said regulators decided to split the Amazon cases so an ongoing investigation into the Buy Box and Prime doesn’t slow down progress on the big data probe.

Detailing concerns around Buy Box and Prime she said: “Looking into Amazon’s data use revealed that Amazon may have set certain rules on its platform that artificially favors both its own retail offers as well as the offers of sellers that use Amazon’s logistics and delivery services. For this reason we have decided to open a second investigation into these business practices.”

The Buy Box appears on Amazon product listing pages — letting Amazon users click to add a product directly to their shopping cart. This means the choice of seller for the product that appears in the box is a key detail.

“The Buy Box is essential,” said Vestager. “It prominently shows you offers for one single seller of a chosen product with the possibility for the consumer to purchase it directly. So winning the Buy Box is crucial for the marketplace sellers as it seems that more than 80% of all transactions on Amazon are channelled through it.”

She also said described it as “of the essence” for retailers to be able to sell their products under Amazon’s Prime label, adding: “Amazon’s Prime consumers are very important to sellers — not only because they’re a constantly increasing number but also because Prime consumers spend significantly more on Amazon than others would do.”

“Our concern is that Amazon may artificially push retails to use its own related services,” she said — pointing to its logistics and delivery arms — which “may potentially lock them deeper into Amazon’s own ecosystem”.

EU regulators will therefore be looking into “the potential effects” of the rules set by Amazon for the Buy Box and for Prime, per Vestager.

“We want to make sure that sellers that do not use the Amazon logistic and delivery program also have a chance to compete on the merits on Amazon’s platform. We also want to make sure that retailers can shift to competing marketplaces without being locked into the Amazon ecosystem,” she added.

While European regulators move forward with antitrust action related to Amazon’s marketplace practices, the ecommerce giant is also in the antitrust crosshairs of US lawmakers.

Last month it was one of a number of tech giants called out in an antitrust report by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. The report argues Amazon wields monopoly power over SMEs via its dominance of online retail — which in turn enables it to “self-preference and disadvantage competitors in ways that undermine free and fair competition”.

Amazon’s response to the US committee’s scrutiny was a fierce rebuttal — saying it accounts for only a tiny fraction of global retail and isn’t even the largest US retailer by revenues. It also claimed its interests align with the third party sellers on its platform, denying there’s any conflict of interests.

The ecommerce giant has similarly rejected the Commission’s charges in its response statement today — ignoring how EU regulators are defining the market in favor of pushing a claim that its business only accounts for 1% of the global retail market.

Professor Tommaso Valletti, a former colleague of Vestager who — as chief competition economist in her department kicked off work on the Amazon case which has led to formal charges being laid out today — suggested another argument that will likely be deployed to try to fend off the big data complaint is ‘how is what Amazon’s doing with merchant data any different to what European supermarket chains with their own private labels do?’

He argues that’s a bogus comparison as European supermarkets don’t have the same level of marketplace dominance over consumers in a given area and are also constrained by physical shelf space.

“Amazon has the ability to show zillions of products (and learn) in ways that are just not comparable with anything among bricks and mortars,” he told TechCrunch.

Making some further general comments on the case, he said: “There’s lots of data that Amazon has and that are obtained from third party sellers. These data are not public: The amazing computational machine of Amazon can use this info to do lots of things, e.g. identify products it might profitably enter by itself etc. in ways that then kill competitors. Competitors might not have known the extent to which such data would be utilised or extracted, which is also a possible manifestation of the abuse.”

He also pointed to Amazon having to correct prior evidence to a U.S. Congressional committee — when Nate Sutton had claimed it did not use “individual seller data directly to compete” with such businesses.

“Amazon soon had to acknowledge that it uses “aggregated data” from independent sellers, but still without explaining how “aggregated” such data might be. So that’s a grey area they will fight over,” Valletti added.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/10/europe-lays-out-antitrust-case-against-amazons-use-of-big-data/

Big tech blows a collective raspberry at the House’s antitrust report

Big tech has responded to the mammoth antitrust report put out by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee yesterday with blanket denials there’s any monopolistic behaviour or competitive imbalances to see here.

Below is a quick run down of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s rebuttals.

Among the committee’s (many) recommendations are structural separations and prohibitions on certain dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business; interoperability and data portability requirements; non-discrimination requirements and a ban on self-preferencing; and beefed up merger and monopolization enforcement, as well as better administration of antitrust laws.

Amazon

In a lengthy but punchy blog post the ecommerce giant brands the committee’s views on antitrust “fringe notions” and “regulatory spitballing” — lathering on dire predictions of doom for small business and hoards of inflated-price-enraged consumers should lawmakers deign to dabble in any “misguided interventions”.

Sample quote:

The flawed thinking would have the primary effect of forcing millions of independent retailers out of online stores, thereby depriving these small businesses of one of the fastest and most profitable ways available to reach customers. For consumers, the result would be less choice and higher prices. Far from enhancing competition, these uninformed notions would instead reduce it.

The substance of Amazon’s argument against the need for antitrust intervention is the top-line claim that retail is “thriving and extraordinarily competitive” — with the tech giant saying it accounts for a tiny fraction of global retail and isn’t even the largest US retailer by revenues (that’s Walmart). Among the grab-bag of competitors Amazon lists as evidence that it’s a mere retail minnow are Best Buy, Costco, Facebook, Kroger, Google Shopping, Home Depot, Shopify and Target. (It doesn’t mention Whole Foods because it already consumed that competitor.)

The strategy here is to claim online and offline retail are just one giant market — because of course if lawmakers slice by online retail alone there’s no denying Amazon’s oversized punch.

Another chunk of rebuttal is against what it claims is “false narrative” that its own interests don’t align with “the thousands of small and medium-sized businesses thriving as sellers in our store”.

“The opposite is true: Amazon and sellers complement each other, and together we create a better customer experience than either could create alone,” it pouts, before going on to say SME sales account for around 60% of all physical products sold on its marketplace, and that it “typically” makes the same or more revenue on third-party sales — rubbishing the idea there could possibly be any conflict of interest at all from Amazon also selling own brand rival products on the same marketplace where only Amazon gets an overview of merchants’ data.

NB: European regulators aren’t so convinced about the lack of competitive risks on dual-sided platforms.  

Apple

Asked for its response to the committee report, Apple sent us an on the record statement in which it writes that it “vehemently” disagrees with the conclusions reached — adding the beautiful kicker to the sentence “with respect to Apple”. Epic trolling Tim.

It also said it would be issuing a more “extensive refutation” of the accusations levelled at its business in the coming days.

Here’s the rest of its statement:

Our company does not have a dominant market share in any category where we do business. From its beginnings 12 years ago with just 500 apps, we’ve built the App Store to be a safe and trusted place for users to discover and download apps and a supportive way for developers to create and sell apps globally. Hosting close to two million apps today, the App Store has delivered on that promise and met the highest standards for privacy, security and quality. The App Store has enabled new markets, new services and new products that were unimaginable a dozen years ago, and developers have been primary beneficiaries of this ecosystem. Last year in the United States alone, the App Store facilitated $138 billion in commerce with over 85% of that amount accruing solely to third-party developers. Apple’s commission rates are firmly in the mainstream of those charged by other app stores and gaming marketplaces. Competition drives innovation, and innovation has always defined us at Apple. We work tirelessly to deliver the best products to our customers, with safety and privacy at their core, and we will continue to do so.

In further background comments the gist of Apple’s argument boils down to ‘Don’t mess with a good thing’.

Aka billions of users across 175 countries can’t be wrong nor unhappy — nor can the tens of millions of developers making wares for its kit, given, for example, how many (1.8M) apps are now on the App Store. (Developers whose apps get excluded are unlikely to be so happy, of course.)

It also defends the 30% commission it takes on app sales — aka the ‘Apple tax’ — pointing to a recent study by Analysis Group that the structure is “similar in magnitude to those of other app stores and digital content marketplaces” — and further noting that for in-app subscriptions the tax falls to 15% after the first year.

Lastly it invokes privacy, pointing out that by reviewing apps and curating its users access to third party software it can offer protection from surveillance, as well as keep things clean by rejecting objectionable, harmful, unsafe, and illegal content. (Albeit, even the Apple gods can’t always do that.)

Facebook

In a brief on the record statement — presumably while it prepares the next chapters of its neverending ‘hard questions‘ series of lobbyist ‘literature’ — the social media giant sought to paint its business success as American as apple pie or, er, the freely unfettered market.

Here’s what it told us in full, with remarks attributed to a faceless “Facebook spokesperson”:

Facebook is an American success story. We compete with a wide variety of services with millions, even billions, of people using them. Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new technologies to deliver more value to people. Instagram and WhatsApp have reached new heights of success because Facebook has invested billions in those businesses. A strongly competitive landscape existed at the time of both acquisitions and exists today. Regulators thoroughly reviewed each deal and rightly did not see any reason to stop them at the time.

So, in sum, there’s absolutely nothing to see here but successful! business! as! usual! is Facebook’s wafer-thin claim. Sure, it bought and assimilated rival social media businesses that could have gained enough market share to challenge its dominance of the category but that’s also just totally great business! Moreover, Facebook buying those really successful rivals just made them even more great and successful! But not so great and successful that there isn’t also “strong” competition in the space Facebook has dominated for 15+ years through its sheer force of business success.

Of course Facebook’s statement makes no mention of Onavo: A VPN app it acquired and used to spy on rival app usage to figure out which apps it should be buying or, er, crushing via cloning their innovations — but that’s a whole other story Facebook isn’t at all keen to talk about for some reason. Ditto the whole paying teenagers to spy on them thing.

In any case, the social media behemoth concludes, it’s the regulators who really screwed up here because they didn’t stop it buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they could have done. So ya! boo! sucks! it’s too late suckers! (we paraphrase).

Google

We also reached out to Google for a response to the antitrust report. The adtech giant had a statement ready to go — which kicks off by emphasising how much value its “free” products pump into the economy (not to mention all the “billions” it throws at R&D), before going on to chide policymakers for making “outdated and inaccurate allegations”.

The statement also features what’s become a go-to tech giant talking point as antitrust has risen up the political agenda in recent years — which is the claim that breaking up Internet giants wouldn’t actually fix anything.

Rather, Google warns (taking a similar tack to Amazon), of economic ruin awaiting the US economy — even from a ‘lesser’ intervention of tinkering with the sacred protections enshrined in Section 230 — and geopolitical doom for America’s tech leadership (taking a similar tack to Facebook). Or, in other words, cut Google and American bleeds. But also, no we’re not a monopoly, hell no! We’re just a verrrry fleet-o-foot operator in a “highly competitive industry”. So, er, which is it?

Interestingly, Google is the only tech giant to include some soft soap for lawmakers in this first response to the antitrust committee report — writing that it “support[s] Congress focusing on areas where clearer laws would help consumers”. (Translation: Stick with the small stuff and leave the important moneymaking business stuff to big tech.)

Here it invokes interoperability (because what technology solutionist doesn’t love a technology ‘solution’ to a monopoly problem); as well as claimed support for passing “comprehensive federal privacy legislation”. (Because a weaker federal framework is the only way to unpick state-level privacy laws with teeth like CCPA).

Here’s Google’s statement in full:

Google’s free products like Search, Maps and Gmail help millions of Americans and we’ve invested billions of dollars in research and development to build and improve them. We compete fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry. We disagree with today’s reports, which feature outdated and inaccurate allegations from commercial rivals about Search and other services.

Americans simply don’t want Congress to break Google’s products or harm the free services they use every day. The goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers, not help commercial rivals. Many of the proposals bandied about in today’s reports — whether breaking up companies or undercutting Section 230 — would cause real harm to consumers, America’s technology leadership and the U.S. economy — all for no clear gain.

We support Congress focusing on areas where clearer laws would help consumers, a few of which are mentioned in today’s reports: Google has long championed the importance of data portability and open mobile platforms; we are arguing a case before the Supreme Court tomorrow for the important principle of software interoperability; and we have urged Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation. We look forward to engaging with Congress on these and other issues moving forward.

TechCrunch’s Taylor Hatmaker contributed to this report 

Steps from the House’s antitrust report are too little, too late when it comes to big tech

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/07/big-tech-blows-a-collective-raspberry-at-the-houses-antitrust-report/

Europe eyeing limits on how big tech can use data and bundle apps — reports

European lawmakers are considering new rules for Internet giants that could include forcing them to share data with smaller rivals and/or put narrow limits on how they can use data in a bid to level the digital playing field.

Other ideas in the mix are a ban on dominant platforms favoring their own services or forcing users to sign up to a bundle of services, according to draft regulatory proposals leaked to the press.

The FT and Reuters both report seeing drafts of the forthcoming Digital Services Act (DSA) — which EU lawmakers are expected to introduce before the end of the year.

Their reports suggest there could be major restrictions on key digital infrastructure such as Apple’s iOS App Store and the Android Google Play store, as well as potentially limits on how ecommerce behemoth Amazon could use the data of merchants selling on its platform — something the Commission is already investigating.

A Commission spokesperson declined to confirm or deny anything in the two reports, saying it does not comment on leaks or comments by others.

“We remain committed to presenting the DSA still this year,” he added.

Per the Financial Times, the leaked draft states: “Gatekeepers shall not use data received from business users for advertising services for any other purpose other than advertising service.”

Its report suggests tech giants will be shocked by the scale of regulations coming down the pipe — noting 30 paragraphs of prohibitions or obligations — with the caveat that the proposal remains at an early stage, meaning big tech lobbyists still have everything to play for.

On bundling, lawmakers are eyeing rules that would mean dominant platforms must let users uninstall any pre-loaded apps — as well as looking at barring them from harming rivals by giving preferential treatment to their own services, according to the reports.

“Gatekeepers shall not pre-install exclusively their own applications nor require from any third party operating system developers or hardware manufacturers to pre-install exclusively gatekeepers’ own application,” per Reuters, quoting the draft it’s seen.

The Commission’s experience of antitrust complaints against Google seems likely to be a factor informing these elements — given a string of EU enforcements against the likes of Google Shopping and Android in recent years have generated headlines but failed to move the competitive needle nor satisfy complainants, even as fresh complaints about Google keep coming.

Google’s ‘no choice’ screen on Android isn’t working, says Ecosia — querying the EU’s approach to antitrust enforcement

Per Reuters the draft rules would also subject gatekeeper platforms to annual audits of their advertising metrics and reporting practices.

Platforms’ self-serving transparency remains a much complained about facet of how these giants currently operate — making efforts to hold them accountable over things like content take-down performance doomed to fuzzy failure.

The Commission’s public consultation on the DSA was launched in June — and closed on September 8.

In a lengthy response earlier this month, Google lobbied against ex ante rules for platform giants, urging regulators to instead modernise existing frameworks where any gaps are found rather than imposing tougher requirements on tech giants.

Should there be ex ante rules the adtech giant pushed lawmakers not to single out any particular business models — while also urging against an “overly simplistic” definition of ‘gatekeeper’ platforms.

Facebook has also been ploughing effort into lobbying commissioners ahead of the DSA proposal — seeking to frame the discussion in key risk areas for its business model, such as around privacy and data portability.

In May, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made time for a livestreamed debate run by a big tech-backed policy ‘think tank’ CERRE — appearing alongside Thierry Breton, the Commission VP for the internal market. The Facebook CEO warned about ‘Cambridge Analytica-style’ privacy risks if too much data portability is enforced, while the commissioner warned Facebook to pay its taxes or expect to be regulated.

More recently, Facebook’s head of global policy has sought to link European SMEs’ post-COVID-19 economic recovery prospects to Facebook’s continued exploitation of people’s data via its ad platform — tacitly warning EU lawmakers against closing down its privacy-hostile business model.

Such lobbying may be falling on deaf ears, though. Earlier this month Breton, told the FT the feeling among Brussels’ lawmakers is that platforms have got ‘too big to care’ — hence the conviction that new rules are needed to enforce higher standards.

Breton said then that lawmakers are considering a rating system to allow the public and stakeholders to assess companies’ behaviour in areas such as tax compliance and how quickly they take down illegal content.

He suggested a blacklist of activities could be applied to dominant platforms with a sliding scale of penalties for non-compliance — up to and including the separation of some operations, according to the FT’s report.

He also committed to not removing the current limited liability platforms have around content published on their platforms, saying: “The safe harbour of the liability exemption will stay. That’s something that’s accepted by everyone.”

In another signal of looming intent earlier this month, the Commission said it’s time to move beyond self-regulatory approaches to tackling problem content like disinformation — though it’s yet to flesh out its policy plan in that area. In June it also suggested it’s eyeing binding transparency requirements related to online hate speech, saying platforms’ own reporting is still too patchy.

How will EC plans to reboot rules for digital services impact startups?

Europe sets out plan to boost data reuse and regulate ‘high risk’ AIs

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/30/europe-eyeing-limits-on-how-big-tech-can-use-data-and-bundle-apps-reports/

Oracle and Salesforce hit with GDPR class action lawsuits over cookie tracking consent

The use of third party cookies for ad tracking and targeting by data broker giants Oracle and Salesforce is the focus of class action style litigation announced today in the UK and the Netherlands.

The suits will argue that mass surveillance of Internet users to carry out real-time bidding ad auctions cannot possibly be compatible with strict EU laws around consent to process personal data.

The litigants believe the collective claims could exceed €10BN, should they eventually prevail in their arguments — though such legal actions can take several years to work their way through the courts.

In the UK, the case may also face some legal hurdles given the lack of an established model for pursuing collective damages in cases relating to data rights. Though there are signs that’s changing.

Non-profit foundation, The Privacy Collective, has filed one case today with the District Court of Amsterdam, accusing the two data broker giants of breaching the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in their processing and sharing of people’s information via third party tracking cookies and other adtech methods.

The Dutch case, which is being led by law-firm bureau Brandeis, is the biggest-ever class action in The Netherlands related to violation of the GDPR — with the claimant foundation representing the interests of all Dutch citizens whose personal data has been used without their consent and knowledge by Oracle and Salesforce. 

A similar case is due to be filed later this month at the High Court in London England, which will make reference to the GDPR and the UK’s PECR (Privacy of Electronic Communications Regulation) — the latter governing the use of personal data for marketing communications. The case there is being led by law firm Cadwalader. 

Under GDPR, consent for processing EU citizens’ personal data must be informed, specific and freely given. The regulation also confers rights on individuals around their data — such as the ability to receive a copy of their personal information.

It’s those requirements the litigation is focused on, with the cases set to argue that the tech giants’ third party tracking cookies, BlueKai and Krux — trackers that are hosted on scores of popular websites, such as Amazon, Booking.com, Dropbox, Reddit and Spotify to name a few — along with a number of other tracking techniques are being used to misuse Europeans’ data on a massive scale.

Per Oracle marketing materials, its Data Cloud and BlueKai Marketplace provider partners with access to some 2BN global consumer profiles. (Meanwhile, as we reported in June, BlueKai suffered a data breach that exposed billions of those records to the open web.)

While Salesforce claims its marketing cloud ‘interacts’ with more than 3BN browsers and devices monthly.

Both companies have grown their tracking and targeting capabilities via acquisition for years; Oracle bagging BlueKai in 2014 — and Salesforce snaffling Krux in 2016.

In this case, NYT is sharing visitor data with e.g.:

– https://t.co/NMsaCzjhv5, Oracle, claims to have profiles on 2bn consumers
– https://t.co/foiigL4T9C: Lotame, claims to have profiles on 3bn users
– https://t.co/BCmd8oKDoq: Salesforce DMP, claims to 'interact' with 3bn users

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) March 23, 2018

 

Discussing the lawsuit in a telephone call with TechCrunch, Dr Rebecca Rumbul, class representative and claimant in England & Wales, said: “There is, I think, no way that any normal person can really give informed consent to the way in which their data is going to be processed by the cookies that have been placed by Oracle and Salesforce.

“When you start digging into it there are numerous, fairly pernicious ways in which these cookies can and probably do operate — such as cookie syncing, and the aggregation of personal data — so there’s really, really serious privacy concerns there.”

The real-time-bidding (RTB) process that the pair’s tracking cookies and techniques feed, enabling the background, high velocity trading of profiles of individual web users as they browse in order to run dynamic ad auctions and serve behavioral ads targeting their interests, has, in recent years, been subject to a number of GDPR complaints, including in the UK.

These complaints argue that RTB’s handling of people’s information is a breach of the regulation because it’s inherently insecure to broadcast data to so many other entities — while, conversely, GDPR bakes in a requirement for privacy by design and default.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office has, meanwhile, accepted for well over a year that adtech has a lawfulness problem. But the regulator has so far sat on its hands, instead of enforcing the law — leaving the complainants dangling. (Last year, Ireland’s DPC opened a formal investigation of Google’s adtech, following a similar complaint, but has yet to issue a single GDPR decision in a cross-border complaint — leading to concerns of an enforcement bottleneck.)

The two lawsuits targeting RTB aren’t focused on the security allegation, per Rumbul, but are mostly concerned with consent and data access rights.

She confirms they opted to litigate rather than trying to try a regulatory complaint route as a way of exercising their rights given the “David vs Goliath” nature of bringing claims against the tech giants in question.

“If I was just one tiny person trying to complaint to Oracle and trying to use the UK Information Commissioner to achieve that… they simply do not have the resources to direct at one complaint from one person against a company like Oracle — in terms of this kind of scale,” Rumbul told TechCrunch.

“In terms of being able to demonstrate harm, that’s quite a lot of work and what you get back in recompense would probably be quite small. It certainly wouldn’t compensate me for the time I would spend on it… Whereas doing it as a representative class action I can represent everyone in the UK that has been affected by this.

“The sums of money then work — in terms of the depths of Oracle’s pockets, the costs of litigation, which are enormous, and the fact that, hopefully, doing it this way, in a very large-scale, very public forum it’s not just about getting money back at the end of it; it’s about trying to achieve more standardized change in the industry.”

“If Salesforce and Oracle are not successful in fighting this then hopefully that send out ripples across the adtech industry as a whole — encouraging those that are using these quite pernicious cookies to change their behaviours,” she added.

The litigation is being funded by Innsworth, a litigation funder which is also funding Walter Merricks’ class action for 46 million consumers against Mastercard in London courts. And the GDPR appears to be helping to change the class action landscape in the UK — as it allows individuals to take private legal action. The framework can also support third parties to bring claims for redress on behalf of individuals. While changes to domestic consumer rights law also appear to be driving class actions.

Commenting in a statement, Ian Garrard, managing director of Innsworth Advisors, said: “The development of class action regimes in the UK and the availability of collective redress in the EU/EEA mean Innsworth can put money to work enabling access to justice for millions of individuals whose personal data has been misused.”

A separate and still ongoing lawsuit in the UK, which is seeking damages from Google on behalf of Safari users whose privacy settings it historically ignored, also looks to have bolstered the prospects of class action style legal actions related to data issues.

While the courts initially tossed the suit last year, the appeals court overturned that ruling — rejecting Google’s argument that UK and EU law requires “proof of causation and consequential damage” in order to bring a claim related to loss of control of data.

The judge said the claimant did not need to prove “pecuniary loss or distress” to recover damages, and also allowed the class to proceed without all the members having the same interest.

Discussing that case, Rumbul suggests a pending final judgement there (likely next year) may have a bearing on whether the lawsuit she’s involved with can be taken forward in the UK.

“I’m very much hoping that the UK judiciary are open to seeing these kind of cases come forward because without these kinds of things as very large class actions it’s almost like closing the door on this whole sphere of litigation. If there’s a legal ruling that says that case can’t go forward and therefore this case can’t go forward I’d be fascinated to understand how the judiciary think we’d have any recourse to these private companies for these kind of actions,” she said.

Asked why the litigation has focused on Oracle and Saleforce, given there are so many firms involved in the adtech pipeline, she said: “I am not saying that they are necessarily the worst or the only companies that are doing this. They are however huge, huge international multimillion-billion dollar companies. And they specifically went out and purchased different bits of adtech software, like BlueKai, in order to bolster their presence in this area — to bolster their own profits.

“This was a strategic business decision that they made to move into this space and become massive players. So in terms of the adtech marketplace they are very, very big players. If they are able to be held to account for this then it will hopefully change the industry as a whole. It will hopefully reduce the places to hide for the other more pernicious cookie manufacturers out there. And obviously they have huge, huge revenues so in terms of targeting people who are doing a lot of harm and that can afford to compensate people these are the right companies to be targeting.”

Rumbul also told us The Privacy Collective is looking to collect stories from web users who feel they have experienced harm related to online tracking.

“There’s plenty of evidence out there to show that how these cookies work means you can have very, very egregious outcomes for people at an individual level,” she added. “Whether that can be related to personal finance, to manipulation of addictive behaviors, whatever, these are all very, very possible — and they cover every aspect of our lives.”

Consumers in England and Wales and the Netherlands are being encouraged to register their support of the actions via The Privacy Collective’s website.

In a statement, Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, lead lawyer at Brandeis, said: “Your data is being sold off in real-time to the highest bidder, in a flagrant violation of EU data protection regulations. This ad-targeting technology is insidious in that most people are unaware of its impact or the violations of privacy and data rights it entails. Within this adtech environment, Oracle and Salesforce perform activities which violate European privacy rules on a daily basis, but this is the first time they are being held to account. These cases will draw attention to astronomical profits being made from people’s personal information, and the risks to individuals and society of this lack of accountability.”

“Thousands of organisations are processing billions of bid requests each week with at best inconsistent application of adequate technical and organisational measures to secure the data, and with little or no consideration as to the requirements of data protection law about international transfers of personal data. The GDPR gives us the tool to assert individuals’ rights. The class action means we can aggregate the harm done,” added partner Melis Acuner from Cadwalader in another supporting statement.

We reached out to Oracle and Salesforce for comment on the litigation.

Oracle EVP and general counsel, Dorian Daley, said:

The Privacy Collective knowingly filed a meritless action based on deliberate misrepresentations of the facts.  As Oracle previously informed the Privacy Collective, Oracle has no direct role in the real-time bidding process (RTB), has a minimal data footprint in the EU, and has a comprehensive GDPR compliance program. Despite Oracle’s fulsome explanation, the Privacy Collective has decided to pursue its shake-down through litigation filed in bad faith.  Oracle will vigorously defend against these baseless claims.

A spokeswoman for Salesforce sent us this statement:

At Salesforce, Trust is our #1 value and nothing is more important to us than the privacy and security of our corporate customers’ data. We design and build our services with privacy at the forefront, providing our corporate customers with tools to help them comply with their own obligations under applicable privacy laws — including the EU GDPR — to preserve the privacy rights of their own customers.

Salesforce and another Data Management Platform provider, have received a privacy related complaint from a Dutch group called The Privacy Collective. The claim applies to the Salesforce Audience Studio service and does not relate to any other Salesforce service.

Salesforce disagrees with the allegations and intends to demonstrate they are without merit.

Our comprehensive privacy program provides tools to help our customers preserve the privacy rights of their own customers. To read more about the tools we provide our corporate customers and our commitment to privacy, visit salesforce.com/privacy/products/

Cookie consent tools are being used to undermine EU privacy rules, study suggests

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/14/oracle-and-salesforce-hit-with-gdpr-class-action-lawsuits-over-cookie-tracking-consent/

Hypotenuse AI wants to take the strain out of copywriting for ecommerce

Imagine buying a dress online because a piece of code sold you on its ‘flattering, feminine flair’ — or convinced you ‘romantic floral details’ would outline your figure with ‘timeless style’. The very same day your friend buy the same dress from the same website but she’s sold on a description of ‘vibrant tones’, ‘fresh cotton feel’ and ‘statement sleeves’.

This is not a detail from a sci-fi short story but the reality and big picture vision of Hypotenuse AI, a YC-backed startup that’s using computer vision and machine learning to automate product descriptions for ecommerce.

One of the two product descriptions shown below is written by a human copywriter. The other flowed from the virtual pen of the startup’s AI, per an example on its website.

Can you guess which is which?* And if you think you can — well, does it matter?

Screengrab: Hypotenuse AI’s website

Discussing his startup on the phone from Singapore, Hypotenuse AI’s founder Joshua Wong tells us he came up with the idea to use AI to automate copywriting after helping a friend set up a website selling vegan soap.

“It took forever to write effective copy. We were extremely frustrated with the process when all we wanted to do was to sell products,” he explains. “But we knew how much description and copy affect conversions and SEO so we couldn’t abandon it.”

Wong had been working for Amazon, as an applied machine learning scientist for its Alexa AI assistant. So he had the technical smarts to tackle the problem himself. “I decided to use my background in machine learning to kind of automate this process. And I wanted to make sure I could help other ecommerce stores do the same as well,” he says, going on to leave his job at Amazon in June to go full time on Hypotenuse.

The core tech here — computer vision and natural language generation — is extremely cutting edge, per Wong.

“What the technology looks like in the backend is that a lot of it is proprietary,” he says. “We use computer vision to understand product images really well. And we use this together with any metadata that the product already has to generate a very ‘human fluent’ type of description. We can do this really quickly — we can generate thousands of them within seconds.”

“A lot of the work went into making sure we had machine learning models or neural network models that could speak very fluently in a very human-like manner. For that we have models that have kind of learnt how to understand and to write English really, really well. They’ve been trained on the Internet and all over the web so they understand language very well. “Then we combine that together with our vision models so that we can generate very fluent description,” he adds.

Image credit: Hypotenuse

Wong says the startup is building its own proprietary data-set to further help with training language models — with the aim of being able to generate something that’s “very specific to the image” but also “specific to the company’s brand and writing style” so the output can be hyper tailored to the customer’s needs.

“We also have defaults of style — if they want text to be more narrative, or poetic, or luxurious —  but the more interesting one is when companies want it to be tailored to their own type of branding of writing and style,” he adds. “They usually provide us with some examples of descriptions that they already have… and we used that and get our models to learn that type of language so it can write in that manner.”

What Hypotenuse’s AI is able to do — generate thousands of specifically detailed, appropriately styled product descriptions within “seconds” — has only been possible in very recent years, per Wong. Though he won’t be drawn into laying out more architectural details, beyond saying the tech is “completely neural network-based, natural language generation model”.

“The product descriptions that we are doing now — the techniques, the data and the way that we’re doing it — these techniques were not around just like over a year ago,” he claims. “A lot of the companies that tried to do this over a year ago always used pre-written templates. Because, back then, when we tried to use neural network models or purely machine learning models they can go off course very quickly or they’re not very good at producing language which is almost indistinguishable from human.

“Whereas now… we see that people cannot even tell which was written by AI and which by human. And that wouldn’t have been the case a year ago.”

(See the above example again. Is A or B the robotic pen? The Answer is at the foot of this post)

Asked about competitors, Wong again draws a distinction between Hypotenuse’s ‘pure’ machine learning approach and others who relied on using templates “to tackle this problem of copywriting or product descriptions”.

“They’ve always used some form of templates or just joining together synonyms. And the problem is it’s still very tedious to write templates. It makes the descriptions sound very unnatural or repetitive. And instead of helping conversions that actually hurts conversions and SEO,” he argues. “Whereas for us we use a completely machine learning based model which has learnt how to understand language and produce text very fluently, to a human level.”

There are now some pretty high profile applications of AI that enable you to generate similar text to your input data — but Wong contends they’re just not specific enough for a copywriting business purpose to represent a competitive threat to what he’s building with Hypotenuse.

“A lot of these are still very generalized,” he argues. “They’re really great at doing a lot of things okay but for copywriting it’s actually quite a nuanced space in that people want very specific things — it has to be specific to the brand, it has to be specific to the style of writing. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. It hurts conversions. It hurts SEO. So… we don’t worry much about competitors. We spent a lot of time and research into getting these nuances and details right so we’re able to produce things that are exactly what customers want.”

So what types of products doesn’t Hypotenuse’s AI work well for? Wong says it’s a bit less relevant for certain product categories — such as electronics. This is because the marketing focus there is on specs, rather than trying to evoke a mood or feeling to seal a sale. Beyond that he argues the tool has broad relevance for ecommerce. “What we’re targeting it more at is things like furniture, things like fashion, apparel, things where you want to create a feeling in a user so they are convinced of why this product can help them,” he adds.

The startup’s SaaS offering as it is now — targeted at automating product description for ecommerce sites and for copywriting shops — is actually a reconfiguration itself.

The initial idea was to build a “digital personal shopper” to personalize the ecommerce experence. But the team realized they were getting ahead of themselves. “We only started focusing on this two weeks ago — but we’ve already started working with a number of ecommerce companies as well as piloting with a few copywriting companies,” says Wong, discussing this initial pivot.

Building a digital personal shopper is still on the roadmap but he says they realized that a subset of creating all the necessary AI/CV components for the more complex ‘digital shopper’ proposition was solving the copywriting issue. Hence dialling back to focus in on that.

“We realized that this alone was really such a huge pain-point that we really just wanted to focus on it and make sure we solve it really well for our customers,” he adds.

For early adopter customers the process right now involves a little light onboarding — typically a call to chat through their workflow is like and writing style so Hypotenuse can prep its models. Wong says the training process then takes “a few days”. After which they plug in to it as software as a service.

Customers upload product images to Hypotenuse’s platform or send metadata of existing products — getting corresponding descriptions back for download. The plan is to offer a more polished pipeline process for this in the future — such as by integrating with ecommerce platforms like Shopify.

Given the chaotic sprawl of Amazon’s marketplace, where product descriptions can vary wildly from extensively detailed screeds to the hyper sparse and/or cryptic, there could be a sizeable opportunity to sell automated product descriptions back to Wong’s former employer. And maybe even bag some strategic investment before then…  However Wong won’t be drawn on whether or not Hypotenuse is fundraising right now.

On the possibility of bagging Amazon as a future customer he’ll only say “potentially in the long run that’s possible”.

Joshua Wong (Photo credit: Hypotenuse AI)

The more immediate priorities for the startup are expanding the range of copywriting its AI can offer — to include additional formats such as advertising copy and even some ‘listicle’ style blog posts which can stand in as content marketing (unsophisticated stuff, along the lines of ’10 things you can do at the beach’, per Wong, or ’10 great dresses for summer’ etc).

“Even as we want to go into blog posts we’re still completely focused on the ecommerce space,” he adds. “We won’t go out to news articles or anything like that. We think that that is still something that cannot be fully automated yet.”

Looking further ahead he dangles the possibility of the AI enabling infinitely customizable marketing copy — meaning a website could parse a visitor’s data footprint and generate dynamic product descriptions intended to appeal to that particular individual.

Crunch enough user data and maybe it could spot that a site visitor has a preference for vivid colors and like to wear large hats — ergo, it could dial up relevant elements in product descriptions to better mesh with that person’s tastes.

“We want to make the whole process of starting an ecommerce website super simple. So it’s not just copywriting as well — but all the difference aspects of it,” Wong goes on. “The key thing is we want to go towards personalization. Right now ecommerce customers are all seeing the same standard written content. One of the challenges there it’s hard because humans are writing it right now and you can only produce one type of copy — and if you want to test it for other kinds of users you need to write another one.

“Whereas for us if we can do this process really well, and we are automating it, we can produce thousands of different kinds of description and copy for a website and every customer could see something different.”

It’s a disruptive vision for ecommerce (call it ‘A/B testing’ on steroids) that is likely to either delight or terrify — depending on your view of current levels of platform personalization around content. That process can wrap users in particular bubbles of perspective — and some argue such filtering has impacted culture and politics by having a corrosive impact on the communal experiences and consensus which underpins the social contract. But the stakes with ecommerce copy aren’t likely to be so high.

Still, once marketing text/copy no longer has a unit-specific production cost attached to it — and assuming ecommerce sites have access to enough user data in order to program tailored product descriptions — there’s no real limit to the ways in which robotically generated words could be reconfigured in the pursuit of a quick sale.

“Even within a brand there is actually a factor we can tweak which is how creative our model is,” says Wong, when asked if there’s any risk of the robot’s copy ending up feeling formulaic. “Some of our brands have like 50 polo shirts and all of them are almost exactly the same, other than maybe slight differences in the color. We are able to produce very unique and very different types of descriptions for each of them when we cue up the creativity of our model.”

“In a way it’s sometimes even better than a human because humans tends to fall into very, very similar ways of writing. Whereas this — because it’s learnt so much language over the web — it has a much wider range of tones and types of language that it can run through,” he adds.

What about copywriting and ad creative jobs? Isn’t Hypotenuse taking an axe to the very copywriting agencies his startup is hoping to woo as customers? Not so, argues Wong. “At the end of the day there are still editors. The AI helps them get to 95% of the way there. It helps them spark creativity when you produce the description but that last step of making sure it is something that exactly the customer wants — that’s usually still a final editor check,” he says, advocating for the human in the AI loop. “It only helps to make things much faster for them. But we still make sure there’s that last step of a human checking before they send it off.”

“Seeing the way NLP [natural language processing] research has changed over the past few years it feels like we’re really at an inception point,” Wong adds. “One year ago a lot of the things that we are doing now was not even possible. And some of the things that we see are becoming possible today — we didn’t expect it for one or two years’ time. So I think it could be, within the next few years, where we have models that are not just able to write language very well but you can almost speak to it and give it some information and it can generate these things on the go.”

*Per Wong, Hypotenuse’s robot is responsible for generating description ‘A’. Full marks if you could spot the AI’s tonal pitfalls

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/07/hypotenuse-ai-wants-to-take-the-strain-out-of-copywriting-for-ecommerce/

Amazon’s 16% bite of Deliveroo finally clears UK competition probe

It’s official: Days after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was peppered with awkward questions by US lawmakers concerned about the market power of his ecommerce empire, the UK’s competition regulator has confirmed it’s happy for the tech giant to take a 16% bite out of local on-demand food delivery app, Deliveroo.

The CMA had been investigating the planned stake for some 15 months, completing phase one of its scrutiny in December. At the time it decided it had enough concerns to move to a phase 2 probe — chewing over whether or not the stake might discourage Amazon from re-entering the online restaurant food market and “further developing its presence within the online convenience grocery delivery market in the UK”, as it put it.

Soon after the regulator started in on this work COVID-19 struck Europe — impacting investigation as it had a marked impact on Deliveroo’s business. Initially the impact of the coronavirus looked negative, with Deliveroo claiming it would have gone out of business without Amazon’s stake. The CMA concurred with this analysis, treating it as a “failing firm” and reasoning that Deliveroo’s exit from the market would have been worse for competition — thereby provisionally clearing the Amazon stake in April.

Then again in June the regulator provisionally cleared the deal — although it now no longer considered Deliveroo failing, being as, from April 2020, it found a sharper than expected recovery in the restaurant food delivery market, as well as a shift in the restaurant ‘mix’ (“towards smaller, independent restaurants and away from large fast food chains”) — both of which resulted in money being poured into Deliveroo’s coffers. Yet then — with the startup’s finances experiencing “rapid and significant turnaround” — the regulator felt it necessary to complete a “substantive assessment” to of the risks to competition.

Now it’s finally concluded that Amazon’s 16% stake does not cross the competitive risk threshold. So Bezos can crack out the bubble — assuming he knows what the heck Deliveroo is of course.

The CMA said its decision to clear the deal on competition grounds is “the culmination of extensive analysis of internal documents from Amazon and Deliveroo, a survey of more than 3,000 consumers, and extensive submissions from interested third parties”.

It said the assessment looked at how a 16% shareholding by Amazon would “affect its incentives to compete independently with Deliveroo in both restaurant delivery and online convenience grocery delivery in the coming years”.

“The CMA ultimately found that this level of investment will not substantially lessen competition in either market. However, if Amazon were to acquire a greater level of control over Deliveroo — through, for example, acquiring a controlling interest in the company — this could trigger a further investigation by the CMA,” it added.

Commenting further in a statement, Stuart McIntosh, inquiry chair, said: “Taking account of the higher legal standard that applies at Phase 2, the Group has concluded that the transaction will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in either restaurant delivery or convenience grocery delivery.”

McIntosh was also at pains to emphasize that the decision reflects the scale of the investment and Amazon ‘s “incentives to compete in both markets” — reiterating the warning that should Amazon try to increase its share of Deliveroo a fresh investigation may be triggered. 

The announcement that Amazon was leading a $575 million Series G investment in the UK food delivery app business dates back to May 2019.

The move signalled a second act for the ecommerce behemoth in the UK food delivery market, after it launched an on-demand food delivery offer with London restaurants for Prime members back in 2016. However it went on to shutter the effort a couple of years later — having faced fierce competition from the likes of Deliveroo and Uber Eats.

Responding to the CMA’s clearance of the Amazon stake, Deliveroo emphasized that “none of the five ‘Theories of Harm’ on which the CMA based its investigation have been substantiated”.

A company spokesperson also emailed this statement:

We are delighted that the CMA has concluded its 15 month investigation and that the Amazon minority investment can now go ahead.

This is fantastic news for UK customers and restaurants, and for the British economy. British born Deliveroo will use the investment to increase choice and value for customers, support for restaurants and will be able to offer more riders the flexible work they value as the company expands.

Deliveroo is excited that Amazon, the most customer-obsessed and innovative company in the world, has shown such a huge vote of confidence in Deliveroo and chosen to invest in the company’s future.

The company offered some updated business metrics, saying there are now 100,000 restaurants on its platform globally, with 30,000 joining this year alone — which it claimed points to “the extent to which the Covid crisis has seen restaurants turn to delivery as a vital source of revenue”.

“75,000 of the restaurants who work with Deliveroo globally are small, independent restaurants who have been hit hardest by the pandemic,” it added.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/04/amazons-16-bite-of-deliveroo-finally-clears-uk-competition-probe/

Advertima rings up $17.5M for computer vision-powered behavioral analytics for in-store retail

Swiss computer vision startup, Advertima, has raised a €15 million Series A (~$17.5M) to build out a machine learning platform for physical retail stores to ‘upgrade’ the shopping experience via real-time shopper behavior analytics. The round is led by existing shareholder, Fortimo Group, a Swiss real estate company.

Fed by visual sensors, Advertima’s platform provides physical retail spaces with a real-time view of what’s going on in store — comprised of AI-powered behavioral and demographic analysis, as shoppers move through the space — with the aim of helping retailers better understand and respond dynamically to customers in store.

The startup calls this its “Human Data Layer” — noting that the tech can support features like smart inventory management and autonomous checkout.

Throw in digital signage (which it also offers) and its platform can be used to serve contextually relevant messaging intended for one or just a few pairs of nearby eyeballs — such as product offers for a particular gender or age bracket, or discounts for families — depending on who’s in proximity of the given digital eye.

Albeit ‘relevancy’ depends upon the calibre of the AI and the quality of the underlying training data. So certainly isn’t a given. Ads that seem to personally address you when you make eye contact, meanwhile, have been a sci-fi staple for years, of course. But the reality of ‘smart’ ads informed by AI analytics could very quickly stray into creepy territory.

An example message shown in a demo video on Advertima’s website isn’t great in this regard — as the system is shown IDing a stick woman and popping up a targeted message that reads: “Hello young woman. All alone?” (uhhh ). So retailers plugging such stuff into their stores need to be hyper sensitive to tone and context (and indeed take a robust approach to assessing how accurate the AI is, or isn’t).

Or, well, they could find shoppers fleeing in horror. (tl;dr no one likes to feel watched while they’re shopping. And if the AI misgenders a potential customer that could be a disaster.)

One flashy pledge from Advertima is that its approach to applying AI to guestimate who’s in the shop and what they’re doing is ‘privacy safe’ — with the startup noting there’s no facial recognition nor biometric detection involved in its system, for one thing.

It also specifies that the visual sensors required for the analytics to function do not store any image or video recordings. Instead it claims to “only process minimal anonymized data” — and only evaluate that in “aggregated form”.

“This means that the unintentional identification of a person is technically impossible,” is the top-line claim.

With long-standing data protection laws covering Europe, and EU lawmakers actively considering new rules to wrap around certain applications of artificial intelligence, there’s a legal incentive not to push such tech’s intrusiveness too far (at least for local use-cases). While Switzerland, which is not a Member of the EU (though it is part of the bloc’s single market), also has a reputation for strict domestic privacy laws — so this homegrown startup’s pitch at least reflects that context.

That said, its system appears to generate a “Person ID” (see below screengrab) — so we’ve asked how long it retains these individual-linked IDs for; and whether or not it links (or enables the linking of) the Person ID with any other data that might be gathered from the shopper, such as an email or a device ID. If the Person IDs are persistent it could enable a retailer to re-identify an individual via the Advertima visually tracked behavioral data — and then be in a position to plug these offline shopping behavior ‘insights’ into an identity-linked customer database or link it to an ad profile that’s maintained by a tracking giant or data broker for ad targeting purposes. All of which would be the opposite of ‘privacy safe’ — so we do have questions. We’ll update this report with any response from Advertima to this.

Image credit: Advertima marketing video

Advertima was founded back in 2016 and has so far forged partnerships with Switzerland’s largest retailer, Migros and the international grocer SPAR, to deploy its tech. It says the system is being used by 14 companies across eight countries at this stage.

It says the new funding will go on further developing its platform, and on scaling so the business can better address the global market for smart retail solutions. Although it’s competing in a space that includes Amazon’s cashierless tech so that’s one Goliath-sized big tech competitor to Advertima’s David.

In a press release announcing the Series A it notes it will be ploughing in €10M of its own revenue too — so touts a total spend of €25M over the next two years on building out its platform.

“We see a world where the physical and digital layers are merged to enhance our daily professional and private lives,” said Advertima Co-Founder and CEO, Iman Nahvi, commenting in a statement.

In a blog post announcing the Series A, he also talked up the autonomous store product — suggesting it will “change how people experience grocery shopping, cinemas, DIY stores, and a whole range of retailers”.

“Delivering smart inventory management, autonomous checkout, in-store analytics, and contextual content on smart digital screens will allow grocers and other retailers to maximize the efficiency of their stores, increase their revenues, and generate greater returns per square meter,” he wrote.

“Retailers can actualize an omnichannel strategy to orchestrate better experiences and relationships with their audience. Soon the standard for retailers will be holistically customer-centric: Cashierless checkouts, no lines, individualized experiences, and real-time product recognition for fast, easy, and fun shopping.”

Given that Amazon began licensing its ‘Just Walk Out’ cashierless tech to other retailers earlier this year, and various tech startups have sprung up to chase the potential of similar systems — such as AiFi, Grabango, Standard Cognition and Zippin — Advertima’s global growth ambitions are tempered by plenty of competition.

Physical retail has also taken a battering from the coronavirus pandemic. Although COVID-19 may, paradoxically, drive demand for cashierless tech — as a way to reduce the risk of viral exposure for staff and shoppers.

AI technology being applied to eliminate retail jobs does raise wider socioeconomic questions too, though.

Also commenting in a supporting statement, Fortimo Group founder Remo Bienz added: “It is clear that the rapid digitalisation of our society is going to have an impact on consumer habits, especially in the retail sector. Advertima is at the cutting-edge of technology in the retail space. As a long-standing shareholder, we know how visionary their technology is, but also how it has been successfully adopted by major, global organisations and already generated significant revenues. We’re excited to be part of Advertima’s journey.”

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/28/advertima-rings-up-17-5m-for-computer-vision-powered-behavioral-analytics-for-in-store-retail/

EU antitrust lawmakers kick off IoT deep dive to follow the data flows

The potential for the Internet of Things to lead to distortion in market competition is troubling European Union lawmakers who have today kicked off a sectoral inquiry.

They’re aiming to gather data from hundreds of companies operating in the smart home and connected device space — via some 400 questionnaires, sent to companies big and small across Europe, Asia and the US — using the intel gleaned to feed a public consultation slated for early next year when the Commission will also publish a preliminary report. 

In a statement on the launch of the sectoral inquiry today, the European Union’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said the risks to competition and open markets linked to the data collection capabilities of connected devices and voice assistants are clear. The aim of the exercise is therefore to get ahead of any data-fuelled competition risks in the space before they lead to irreversible market distortion.

“One of the key issues here is data. Voice assistants and smart devices can collect a vast amount of data about our habits. And there’s a risk that big companies could misuse the data collected through such devices, to cement their position in the market against the challenges of competition. They might even use their knowledge of how we access other services to enter the market for those services and take it over,” said Vestager.

“We have seen this type of conduct before. This is not new. So we know there’s a risk that some of these players could become gatekeepers of the Internet of Things, with the power to make or break other companies. And these gatekeepers might use that power to harm competition, to the detriment of consumers.”

The Commission recently opened up a consultation on whether regulators needs new powers to address competition risks in digital markets, including being able to intervene when they suspect digital market tipping.

It is also asking for views on how to shape regulations around platform governance.

The IoT sectorial enquiry adds another plank to its approach towards reformulating digital regulation in the data age. (Notably competition chief Vestager is simultaneously the Commission EVP in charge of pan-EU digital strategy.)

On the IoT front, risks Vestager said she’s concerned about include what she couched as familiar antitrust behaviour such as “self-preferencing” — i.e. a company directing users towards its own products or services — as well as companies inking exclusive deals to send users “preferred” provider, thereby locking out more open competition.

“Whether that’s for a new set of batteries for your remote control or for your evening takeaway. In either case, the result can be less choice for users, less opportunity for others to compete, and less innovation,” she suggested.

“The trouble is that competition in digital markets can be fragile,” Vestager added. “When big companies abuse their power, they can very quickly push markets beyond the tipping point, where competition turns to monopoly. We’ve seen that happen before.  If we don’t act in good time, there’s a serious risk that it will happen again, with the Internet of Things.”

The commissioner’s remarks suggest EU lawmakers could be considering regulations that aim to enforce interoperability between smart devices and platforms — although Vestager also said they will be asking about any barriers to achieving such cross-working.

“For us to get the most out of the Internet of Things, our smart devices need to communicate. So if the devices from different companies don’t work together, then consumers may be locked in to just one provider.  And be limited to what that provider has to offer,” she said.

“We’re asking about the products they sell, and how the markets for those products work. We’re asking about data – how it’s collected, how it’s used, and how companies make money from the data they collect. And we’re asking about how these products and services work together, and about possible problems with making them interoperable.”

Vestager has raised concerns about the potential for voice assistant technology to lead to market concentration and distortion before — saying last year that they present an acute challenge to regulators who she said then were “trying to figure out how access to data will change the marketplace”.

The question of how access to digital data feeds platform monopolies has been a long standing preoccupation for the now second term competition chief. Although the Commission’s work on figuring out how data access changes marketplace function remains something of a work in progress.

Vestager has an open investigation into Amazon’s use of third party data on her plate, for example. It also inked a first set of rules on ecommerce platform fairness last year. More rules may be incoming in a draft proposal for reformulating wider liability rules for platforms that’s slated to land by the end of this year, aka the forthcoming Digital Services Act.

The Commission noted today that a prior sector inquiry — into ecommerce markets — helped shape new rules against “unjustified geoblocking” in the EU, although it has not yet been able to dismantle geoblocking barriers to accessing digital services across the Single Market’s internal borders.

Last year privacy concerns raised in Europe around how tech giants operate voice assistant ‘quality grading’ programs, which involved human contractors listening in to users’ recordings, led to a number of changes — including the previously non-transparent programs being publicly disclosed, and choice/controls being provided to users.

Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/16/eu-antitrust-lawmakers-kick-off-iot-deep-dive-to-follow-the-data-flows/