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Major privacy complaints targeting the legality of Meta’s core advertising business model in Europe have finally been settled via a dispute resolution mechanism baked into the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The complaints, which date back to May 2018, take aim at the tech giant’s so-called “forced consent” to continue tracking and targeting users by processing their personal data to build profiles for behavioral advertising so the outcome could have major ramifications for how Meta operates if regulators order the company to amend its practices.

The GDPR also allows for large fines for major violations — of up to 4% of global annual turnover.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), a steering body for the GDPR, confirmed today it has stepped in to three binding decisions in the three complaints against Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The trio of complaints were filed by European privacy campaign group, noyb, as soon as the GDPR entered into application across the EU. So it’s taken some 4.5 years just to get to this point.

The EU’s flagship data protection regulation has been much criticised for the slow pace of enforcement on major cross-border complaints against tech giants and this clutch of strategic complaints is one of a handful of poster children for those gripes. But while decisions are now finally in sight the wrangling could still continue — since Meta may appeal against any enforcement, both in Irish courts and in front of EU judiciary (in the case of the EDPB’s binding decisions), potentially putting any corrective orders on hold pending the outcome of its appeals.

What exactly has been decided? The EDPB is not disclosing that yet. The protocol it’s following means it passes its binding decisions back to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Meta’s lead privacy regulator in the EU, which must then apply them in the final decisions it will issue.

The DPC now has one month to issue final decisions and confirm any financial penalties. So we should get the full gory details by early next year.

The Wall Street Journal may offer a glimpse of what’s to come: It’s reporting that Meta’s ad model will face restrictions in the EU — citing “people familiar with the situation”.

It also reports the company will face “significant” fines for breaching the GDPR.

“The board’s rulings Monday, which haven’t yet been disclosed publicly, don’t directly order Meta to change practices but rather call for Ireland’s Data Protection Commission to issue public orders that reflect its decisions, along with significant fines,” the WSJ wrote, citing (unnamed) sources.

Covering the WSJ’s report, Reuters noted that shares in Meta fell 5.3% in morning trading following the development.

A spokeswoman for the EDPB confirmed it cannot comment on the substance of the binding decisions it’s taken.

“In line with Art. 65 (5) GDPR, we cannot comment on the content of the decisions until after the Irish DPC has notified the controller of its final decisions,” she told TechCrunch. “As indicated in our press release, the EDPB looked into whether or not the processing of personal data for the performance of a contract is a suitable legal basis for behavioural advertising, but at this point in time we cannot confirm what the EDPB’s decision in this matter was.”

The DPC also declined comment on the newspaper’s report — but deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to us that it will announce binding decisions on these complaints in early January.

We’ve also reached out to Meta for a response to the development.

The company was recently spotted in a filing setting aside €3BN for data protection fines in 2022 and 2023 — a large chunk of which has yet to land.

GDPR fines for Meta so far this year include a €265M penalty for a Facebook data-scraping breach last month; €405M for an Instagram violation of children’s privacy back in September; and €17M for several 2018 Facebook data breaches issued in March — plus France’s data protection watchdog hit Meta with a €60M penalty in January over Facebook cookie consent violations of the EU’s ePrivacy Directive — for a total of €747M in publicly disclosed EU data protection and privacy fines… so, per its filing, the tech giant appears to be expecting 2023 to be considerably more expensive for its European business.

One thing is clear: A lot is at stake for the company.

As the EDPB’s press release confirms, its decisions “settle[s], among others, the question of whether or not the processing of personal data for the performance of a contract is a suitable legal basis for behavioural advertising, in the cases of Facebook and Instagram, and for service improvement, in the case of WhatsApp”.

So, depending on what’s been decided, Meta could finally be forced to ask users if they want to be tracked — a choice the adtech giant currently denies. On Facebook and Instagram it’s either agree to be profiled and targeted — or no service for you.

If Meta is forced to ask users if they want “personalized” ads (its favored euphemism for surveillance ads) that is definitely big news — given rates of denials when web users are actually given a choice over targeted ads are typically very high. (See for e.g. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency ‘request to track’ feature for third party iOS apps — where denials were running at circa 75%, per Adjust data released earlier this year and covered by MediaPost.)

The crux of noyb’s original complaints against Meta services was that users were not offered a choice to deny its processing for advertising — despite the GDPR stipulating that if consent is the legal basis being claimed for processing personal data it must be specific, informed and freely given. (Not, er, bundled, manipulated and forced!)

However — plot twist! — it later emerged that as the GDPR came into application Meta had quietly switched from claiming consent as its legal basis for this behavioral advertising processing to saying it is necessary for the performance of a contract — and claiming users of Facebook and Instagram are in a contract with Meta to receive targeting ads.

This argument implies that Meta’s core service is not social networking; it’s behavioural advertising. noyb’s honorary chairman and long-time privacy law thorn in Facebook’s side, Max Schrems, has called this an exceptionally shameless attempt to bypass the GDPR.

A draft decision by Ireland’s DPC on the complaints which was published by noyb last year (much to the DPC’s chagrin) revealed the Irish regulator had not been minded to object to Meta’s consent bypass. However other EU DPAs — which are able to lodge objections to a lead supervisor’s draft decision under the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism for dealing with cross border complaints — did object and months of regulatory wrangling followed as different EU regulators slugged it out to see if they could agree.

Evidently, in this case, the DPAs could not find consensus between themselves — hence the EDPB stepping in with binding decisions now. And the Board’s decision is final.

Responding to this development — and citing the WSJ’s reporting — noyb writes in a press release that the EDPB has overturned the DPC’s much derided draft decision (which had also only proposed a paltry fine of $36M), saying the decision “requires that Meta may not use personal data for ads based on an alleged ‘contract’”.

“Users will therefore need to have a yes/no consent option,” it said — dubbing the outcome a “win” (even without knowing the exact size of the “substantial” fine it says was requested by the EDPB).

Other forms of advertising by Meta — like contextual ads where targeting is based on the content of the page being viewed — are not prohibited under the EDPB’s decision, per noyb, which predicts the decision will nonetheless “dramatically” limit Meta’s profits in the EU.

In a statement, Schrems said: “Instead of having a yes/no option for personalized ads, [Meta] just moved the consent clause in the terms and conditions. This is not just unfair but clearly illegal. We are not aware of any other company that has tried to ignore the GDPR in such an arrogant way.”

“This is a huge blow to Meta’s profits in the EU,” he added. “People now need to be asked if they want their data to be used for ads or not. They must have a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer and can change their mind at any time. The decision ensures a level playing field with other advertisers that also need to get opt-in consent.”

noyb’s take on the development also pours cold water on the prospect of any Meta appeal against this GDPR smackdown to its core business model — calling the chances of the company winning such an appeal “minimal” since the final decisions have been handed down by the EDPB, an expert body that’s responsible for ensuring harmonized application of the GDPR across the bloc (by, for example, providing guidance on how the rules should be applied in practice).

It also points to two similar cases already before the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) on Meta’s consent bypass — suggesting those “may settle the issue and all appeals for good”.

noyb further suggests Meta could face legal action from users — “over the illegal use of their data for the past 4.5 years”.

Meta is already facing a number of class action privacy-citing suits in Europe. Further GDPR enforcement will only dial up more momentum for damages claims as litigation funders scent victory.

Meta’s behavioral ads will finally face GDPR privacy reckoning in January by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

At its annual Lens Fest event, Snap announced that it’s experimenting with a small group of AR creators and developers to build Lenses with digital goods that can be purchased with Snap Tokens. As part of this experiment, users will be able to unlock power-ups, AR items and extra tools within select Lenses.

Snap Tokens, which were first introduced in 2020, can be purchased within the Snapchat app by clicking on your profile icon and scrolling down to “My Snap Tokens.” You can purchase 80 Tokens for $0.99, 250 Tokens for $2.99, 500 Tokens for $4.99 or 1,100 Tokens for $9.99. Tokens can currently be redeemed for Gifts to send to creators or for exclusive Bitmoji merchandise. With this new experiment, users will be able to use their Tokens to unlock digital goods within a Lens.

Sophia Dominguez, the head of Snap’s global AR community efforts, told TechCrunch in an interview that the company hand-selected 10 AR creators and developers for this pilot. For this initial roll out, Snap focused on three use cases for AR: self expression, fashion and play. The company looked for three to five developers for each category and then whittled it down to a select few.

One of the creators that Snap worked with for this pilot is Phillip Walton, the creator of the famous Potato Lens. Dominguez says Walton had noted that users had asked for ways to enhance or upgrade the potato Lens, which the experiment now makes possible, as users can start using Tokens to upgrade the Lens. You can redeem Tokens to turn the potato into a police officer, magician, cat and more.

Another popular Lens that is part of the pilot is the multiplayer Table Trenches Lens by DB Creations. As part of the new experiment, users will be able to redeem Tokens to get new skins, access new levels and other opportunities within the Lens.

“With digital goods, users are able to upgrade Lenses and add all sorts of different capabilities to it,” Dominguez told TechCrunch. “We’re exploring these digital goods as new ways for creators and developers to build businesses beyond creating Lenses for brands and clients. This is the very beginning and we’re excited to see how Snapchatters engage with it.”

Dominguez says Snap launched this new experiment in response to feedback from its community of AR creators and developers who want additional ways to monetize. Snap didn’t share the specifics about the monetization behind this experiment, but noted that creators received payment for the production of their upgraded Lenses and will continue to receive payments.

These new Lenses will roll out in Australia and New Zealand over the coming weeks and will appear in the Lens Carousel and Lens Explorer. The company plans to expand the experiment to more countries in the future.

The experiment represents a new way for Snapchat to generate revenue via Tokens, which is something that it seems to be focusing more on lately. This morning, Snapchat said it’s partnering with Adidas to launch a new exclusive Bitmoji Fashion Drop that can be claimed via Tokens. Snap’s announcements from today indicate that the company is looking to implement Tokens into more parts of its app as a way to generate additional revenue.

Today’s news comes as Snap’s AR community is continuing to grow. The company announced today that there are more than 300,000 AR creators and developers on its platform, which is an increase from the 250,000 figure that Snap shared at its previous Lens Fest event. Snap says these AR creators and developers have built more than three million Lenses. Dominguez says 80% of these AR creators are based outside of the United States. Of the 300,000 AR creators, 300 of them have garnered more than one billion views on their Lenses. In total, Lenses have been viewed more than five trillion times.

In order to continue investing in AR, Snap announced today that it’s launching a new Lensathon with a $200,000 prize pool to challenge creators to push what’s possible in AR. Creators have until January 31st to compete for a part of the prize.

Snapchat is testing Lenses with power-ups and upgrades that you can buy by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Everyone who has email knows what a canned marketing email sounds like (and has probably deleted tons of them). For sales development representatives, automated emails are necessary to create the volume of outbound inquiries they need to get a decent number of leads. But badly written emails result in few replies and also make companies look bad. SellScale wants to do away with standard “spray and pray” campaigns with a platform that uses generative AI, including GPT-3, to craft more natural sounding, personalized emails at scale.

SellScale announced today it has raised $3 million in funding led by Pear.VC’s Pejman Nozad, with participation from Ovo Fund’s Eric Chen and Browder Capital’s Joshua Browder. The startup claims its revenue has doubled month-over-month for the last three months.

Founders Ishan Sharma and Aakash Adesara met in high school and were roommates at U.C. Berkeley. After graduating, each of them had jobs where they worked closely with sales and growth teams. Aakash was in growth engineering at Nextdoor, while Ishan held a position in McKinsey’s Growth, Marketing and Sales Service lines. The two reunited at healthcare startup Athelas, where Sharma was in charge of marketing and Adesara led growth engineering.

As a side hustle, the two started DailyDropout.FYI, a weekly newsletter that focuses on one startup a week and has 80,000 readers. They sent cold emails to founders, researching their backgrounds and products to say why they wanted to feature them. The process was time-consuming, so Adesara decided to train OpenAI’s language model GPT-3 on 100 emails Sharma had written.

Those emails were able to get 35% conversion rates, so they also started using language models to reach potential advertisers. As a result, the two say they were able to grow DailyDropout.FYI to six figures annually.

SellScale was founded after the two decided to bring the tools they had created for their newsletter to larger teams. To use SellScale, sales development representatives first pull the best outbound emails written by their teams to train GPT-3 and the other language models used by the platform. Then SellScale personalizes those emails by pulling data from clients’ CRMs and publicly available information from more than 40 data sources, including social media platforms, RSS feeds and articles. As more emails are sent through SellScale, its AI continues to use successful ones to refine its models.

To help cutdown on a growth team’s workflow, SellScale integrates with tools like Gmail, Outreach.io, Apollo, LinkedIn and Zapier.

Sharma said SellScale takes small details seriously. For example, if a client in healthcare is sending emails to licensed doctors, it automatically adjusts its model to write “Dr. [last name]” instead of their first name.

SellScale also works closely with sales team to help them hit quarterly revenue targets. Sharma said many have seen up to 70% more qualified conversions after they started using SellScale.

Startups that use GPT-3 to help marketing customers have pulled a lot of investor interest lately. Some that TechCrunch have covered include Regie, ScaleNut and Copy.ai.

Sharma said SellScale differentiates from other writing platforms that use large language models with its workflow automation tools that automatically generate, send and fine-tine emails with minimal coaching. After their experience with growth teams at Athelas and Nextdoor, Sharma and Adesara wanted SellScale to require as little involvement as possible from sales development representatives.”

“We don’t want to be another tool to their dozens,” he said. “Many competitors measure the value of their product on how much time salespeople spend inside their product. We measure value with how much sales people don’t have to use SellScale or prospecting tools to write outbound.”

Sellscale uses generative AI to create better marketing emails by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Cloud computing giant Rackspace has confirmed that it has been hit by ransomware attack that has left a number of its customers without access to email.

Rackspace’s hosted Microsoft Exchange service started experiencing problems on Friday last week. At the time, Rackspace posted a notice on its status page saying that due to a “security incident,” it had “powered down and disconnected” the service. In an update published on Tuesday, Rackspace has confirmed that a ransomware attack is behind the ongoing outage.

“As you know, on Friday, December 2nd, 2022, we became aware of suspicious activity and immediately took proactive measures to isolate the Hosted Exchange environment to contain the incident,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday. “We have since determined this suspicious activity was the result of a ransomware incident.”

Rackspace says that the investigation, led by an unnamed cyber defense firm, is in its early stages and that the company has yet to determine “what, if any, data was affected.” The company added that if it determines that sensitive information was affected, it will “notify customers as appropriate”.

When asked by TechCrunch, Rackspace spokesperson Natalie Silva declined to share any more information about the nature of the incident or how the hackers were able to compromise its systems.

However, security researcher Kevin Beaumont believes the incident may involve exploitation of the Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, better known as ProxyNotShell. ProxyNotShell first came to light in late September after Vietnamese cybersecurity company GTSC observed it being exploited in the wild. Microsoft confirmed exploitation the following month and linked it to a state-sponsored hacker group.

The issues affecting Rackspace’s hosted Microsoft Exchange service remains ongoing at the time of writing. The company is currently moving its Hosted Exchange customers over to Microsoft 365 to limit disruption.

Rackspace noted that the ransomware incident could result in lost revenue for its hosted exchange business, which generates about $30 million a year. The company added that it could have incremental costs associated with its response to the incident.

Rackspace blames ransomware attack for ongoing Exchange outage by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

In April, an Apple Store in Atlanta became the first of the company’s American retail locations to file for a union election. Yet about a month later, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) withdrew its request for an election. The labor union alleged that Apple was using illegal union-busting tactics to influence voting, like interrogating workers and requiring them to attend daily, mandatory anti-union meetings. Now, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found merit to the CWA’s complaint that these anti-union activities were illegal.

“Apple executives think the rules don’t apply to them. Holding an illegal forced captive audience meeting is not only union-busting, but an example of psychological warfare,” said Tom Smith, CWA Organizing Director, in a statement. “We commend the NLRB for recognizing captive audience meetings for exactly what they are: a direct violation of labor rights.”

In April, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo saying that captive audience meetings are inherently inconsistent with the rights employees have under the National Labor Relations Act. In the past, NLRB representatives had ruled that these meetings were permissible.

Apple workers have successfully won two unions amid an uptick in national labor organizing: one in Oklahoma City, and one in Maryland. Yet Apple has deliberately tried to dissuade workers from joining a union. In May, the trillion-dollar company’s vice president of people and retail Deirdre O’Brien sent a video to 58,000 retail staff about unions.

“I worry that because the union would bring its own legally mandated rules, that would determine how we work through issues,” O’Brien said. “It could make it harder for us to act to swiftly address things that you raise.”

According to a memo leaked to Motherboard in May, Apple also sent anti-union talking points to some store leaders.

“An outside union that doesn’t know Apple or our culture would make things more complex and rigid,” one talking point says. “Leaders wouldn’t have the flexibility to act in the moment or to address each person’s unique needs like they do now.”

Apple retains the same anti-union law firm, Littler Mendelson, that represents companies like Amazon and Starbucks, which have also been found by the NLRB to have violated labor laws. But employees organizing have said that they want a union to ensure they get wage increases consistent with inflation and equitable stock options.

“We think having union representation and a collective bargaining agreement is the best way to make lasting change at Apple and to make sure that the company follows through on its promises and makes the credo more than just a poem printed on cardstock,” the Apple Retail Union says on its website.

TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for comment.

Apple illegally interfered with union organizing in Atlanta, labor board finds by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

An old maxim among courtroom litigators states that you should only ask a question of a witness when you already know how they will answer. Otherwise, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise. For this reason, effective prosecutors and defense attorneys engage in various pre-trial activities, including “witness prep,” to help them take control of the narrative.

As many SaaS companies look to increase Net Revenue Retention (NRR) to compensate for weak or declining sales, they may want to adopt and adapt this maxim to say: “Before we ask existing customers to renew or expand their subscriptions, we will pursue customer success (CS) strategies and activities (“customer prep”) that help us avoid unpleasant surprises and increase the number of successful outcomes.”

Now comes the tricky part. What kinds of customer health data should you collect and analyze to help you avoid unpleasant surprises? And which strategies and activities should your sales and post-sales teams pursue in response to this data?

A DEAR solution

Historically, many CS leaders have relied on anecdotal evidence and presumed “best practices” in the hope of boosting NRR. Even when this approach seemed to work, customer success managers (CSMs) often lacked the empirical evidence to firmly connect the success with their team’s good work.

To overcome such strategic “squishiness,” we spearheaded the development of a more scientific, data-driven customer health scoring and retention modeling methodology. Known as DEAR (Deployment, Engagement, Adoption, ROI), this framework aims to help CS teams deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive existing customers to their desired outcomes. In addition to a customer experience score, DEAR also provides a customer outcomes score, an objective indicator of whether the customer is seeing value and ROI on their investment.

Below is a breakdown of DEAR’s four components.

Note that in order to efficiently leverage this information, you’ll need the right technology (ideally, customer management software) and behavioral data (ideally, telemetry about how your customers are using the product).

Deployment

Is the customer activated? Are they set up to effectively use what they bought? Poor Deployment is often a strong indicator of the risk of partial churn or downsell.

Use customer health data to grow and forecast NRR by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Lensa has been climbing the app store hit lists with its avatar-generating AI that is making artists wave the red flag. Now, there’s another reason to fly the flag, as it turns out it’s possible — and way too easy — to use the platform to generate non-consensual soft porn.

TechCrunch has seen photo sets generated with the Lensa app, which includes images with breasts and nipples clearly visible in the images with faces of recognizable people. It seemed like the kind of thing that shouldn’t have been possible, so we decided to try it ourselves. To verify that Lensa will create the images it perhaps shouldn’t, we created two sets of Lensa avatars:

One set, based on 15 photos of a well-known actor.
Another set, based on the same 15 photos, but with an additional set of 5 photos added of the same actor’s face, photoshopped onto topless models.

The first set of images was in line with the AI avatars we’ve seen Lensa generate in the past. The second set, however, was a lot spicier than we were expecting. It turns out the AI takes those Photoshopped images as permission to go wild, and it appears it disables an NSFW filter. Out of the 100-image set, 11 were topless photos of higher quality (or, at least with higher stylistic consistency) than the poorly done edited topless photos the AI was given as input.

Generating saucy images of celebrities is one thing, and as illustrated by the source images we were able to find, there has long been people on the internet who are willing to collage some images together in Photoshop. Just because it’s common doesn’t make it right — in point of fact, celebrities absolutely deserve their privacy and should definitely not be made victims of non-consensual sexualized depictions. But so far, getting those to look realistic takes a lot of skill with photo editing tools along with hours, if not days, of work.

The big turning point, and the ethical nightmare, is the ease with which you can create near-photorealistic AI-generated art images by the hundreds without any tools other than a smartphone, an app, and a few dollars.

The ease with which you can create images of anyone you can imagine (or, at least, anyone you have a handful of photos of), is terrifying. Adding NSFW content into the mix, and we are careening into some pretty murky territory very quickly: your friends or some random person you met in a bar and exchanged Facebook friend status with, may not have given consent to someone generating softcore porn of them.

It appears that if you have 10-15 ‘real’ photos of a person and are willing to take the time to photoshop a handful of fakes, Lensa will gladly churn out a number of problematic images.

AI art generators are already churning out pornography by the thousands of images, exemplified by the likes of Unstable Diffusion and others. These platforms, and the unfettered proliferation of other so-called ‘deepfake’ platforms are turning into an ethical nightmare, are prompting the UK government to push for laws criminalizing the dissemination of non-consensual nude photos. This seems like a very good idea, but the internet is a hard-to-govern place at the best of times, and we’re collectively facing a wall of legal, moral, and ethical quandaries.

We reached out to Prisma Labs, who make the Lensa AI for a comment, and will update the story when we hear back from them.

It’s way too easy to trick Lensa AI into making NSFW images by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Since its launch as an open-source project by Yandex in 2016, ClickHouse has become one of the leading databases for online analytical processing (OLAP), allowing businesses to quickly generate ad-hoc reports over very large datasets. In 2021, Yandex spun off ClickHouse into its own company and joined an initial $50 million Series A funding round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital. Two months later, Coatue and Altimeter led the company’s Series B round, with participation from Index Ventures, Benchmark, Lightspeed and Redpoint. Now, ClickHouse is extending this round with fresh capital from Thrive Capital.

The company, which is headquartered in San Francisco and has a European engineering base in Amsterdam, did not disclose the exact size of Thrive’s investment, but ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz stated that it was an “eight-figure round”.

“ClickHouse offers the most efficient database for fast and large-scale analytics,” said Avery KIemmer, an investor at Thrive Capital. “We have long admired this team, and are excited to partner with them as they launch ClickHouse Cloud to an even wider audience.”

In addition to announcing the new funding, the company also today launched ClickHouse Cloud, a fully managed, SOC 2 Type 2-compliant cloud-hosted version of its database that is now available in the AWS Marketplace. Support for Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure cloud is in the works. The company first launched this service into beta a few months ago and is now ready to launch it into GA.

Maybe because of its origins within Yandex, ClickHouse has flown a bit under the press’ radar, but it’s currently in use by the likes of Cloudflare, Uber, eBay, Comcast and Cisco. It’s also very hard to have a conversation about databases and analytics these days without the company being referenced in some form or another.

To run ClickHouse, Yandex brought on former Elastic CRO and Salesforce exec Aaron Katz as the company’s co-founder and CEO. Unlike other open-source companies, the ClickHouse team decided to skip past launching enterprise versions or go for an open-core model with proprietary features and skip right to a cloud-hosed version. Katz explained that this decision was based on the previous experience of the founding team.

“Trying to develop both on-premise software and sell support and stand up an enterprise-grade cloud service can be challenging to do simultaneously,” he said. “We believe the future is in managed services: serverless cloud offerings that are cloud agnostic and multi-cloud — that are secure and reliable and scalable, resource efficient and highly performant. So we developed ClickHouse Cloud and we launched it earlier this year as a beta state and got overwhelmingly positive response from the market.”

In October, ClickHouse acquired Arctype, a cross-platform GUI for managing and querying databases (think a modern phpMyAdmin). Arctype itself only launched half a year before that, so ClickHouse moved quickly here and as Katz noted, with a full war chest, we’ll likely see the company make more of these smaller acquisitions in the future. The team has now re-written Arctype as a native offering inside of ClickHouse Cloud.

As ClickHouse VP of Product Tanaya Bragin noted, the company also tuned the software to increase performance and added a lower pricing tier for developers who want to get started with the service (after a free 30-day trial). And because there is still a talent crunch for database experts, ClickHouse is also launching ClickHouse Academy with a catalog of free courses and recordings of its own onboarding workshops.

Bragin also stressed that current users of the ClickHouse open-source version will be able to easily migrate to ClickHouse Cloud. From the application’s perspective, the two versions are equivalent. The advantage of the hosted version, of course, is that users won’t have to manage a complex database system themselves. The system will automatically handle sharding, replication and upgrading. Auto-scaling, too, is built into ClickHouse Cloud. “The separation of storage and compute is an important accomplishment that the customers benefit from, which makes it more resource efficient and cost effective than running it on your own,” Katz added.

The ClickHouse team plans to use the new funding on expanding its product and engineering teams. Given its focus on product-led growth (PLG), the company doesn’t plan to focus too much on expanding its marketing efforts for the time being.

“We’re really pursuing this PLG distribution model, where you can go to ClickHouse Cloud today, you can create your own free trialand we give you free credits,” Katz said. “It’s totally frictionless. You never have to talk to anybody and sales. You can evaluate the service on your own. If you like what your experiencing, you can add your credit card and pay as you go monthly with totally transparent, consumption-based billing. If we get that right — and the feedback from these early 100+ customers hasbeen very encouraging. Then we won’t need to have a really expensive sales and marketing engine, because with the PLG motion, the product will distribute itself.”

ClickHouse launches ClickHouse Cloud, extends its Series B by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Ready for a holiday sing-along? Apple today announced it’s launching a new Apple Music feature that will turn tens of millions of its top songs into karaoke tracks of sorts, enabled by a tap of a button. With Apple Sing, as the new addition is called, users will be able to tap on a slider button on popular songs to lower the vocals, then sing along in time with the music using enhanced real-time lyrics.

The feature won’t see users switching over to music tracks that already have the vocals removed, however. Instead, it’s relying on an on-device machine learning algorithm that processes the music in real-time, Apple says. The algorithm isolates the vocals from the rest of the song, allowing users to adjust their volume accordingly using a new slider button in the Apple Music app.

The tech builds on Apple’s noise-cancellation expertise and other developments it’s made for FaceTime, the company said. The feature works on iPhone 11 and later, plus iPad and Apple TV.

To use the feature, users will first enter the lyrics view, then tap on a microphone button to access the slider to adjust the vocals’ volume. At its lowest level, the feature doesn’t fully remove the vocals, we should note — but it’s good enough for an at-home karaoke party or playtime with the kids.

Apple Sing also builds upon Apple’s existing investment in real-time lyrics, which already allows users to view synced lyrics as they listen to music on the service. Now, those lyrics have been upgraded to better support Apple Sing.

Instead of just animating the lyrics line-by-line, as before, the enhanced lyrics feature will now animate with each syllable for beat-by-beat sync. As with karaoke, this can help people when singing along, even if they aren’t as familiar with the song itself.

In addition, the lyrics are being updated with two other new features to better support overlapping vocals and duets.

With the new background vocals feature, Apple Music will for the first time break out the backup vocal from the primary line and animate those separately, as they’re sung. This would allow a group of people singing along to a song to take different parts, for example. These background lyrics are also shown in a smaller font to differentiate them from the lead vocals.

Meanwhile, lyrics for duets will now indicate when there’s a vocalist change by switching the justification of the lyrics on the screen to make it easier to know when you should start or when it’s time for a duet partner to begin.

There are other subtle enhancements to lyrics, like how they’ll now add a highlight and undulate when the artist is holding on a word or part of a word for a longer period to signal to those singing along to hold that note, too.

Because there’s a process all the songs have to go through internally before being enabled for Apple Sing, the feature won’t be available across all of Apple Music’s catalog of 100 million songs. Instead, Apple says it will be available at launch across the top 80% of its most-played songs to start and will grow over time. To make these songs easier to find, Apple will launch 50 playlists that showcase this new feature in different ways, including thematic playlists, and playlists by decade and genre. These will be highlighted across Apple Music across the latest iPhone, iPad and Apple TV models.

While Apple Sing’s vocal control feature won’t be available on Android, the company noted that Android users will gain the other real-time lyrics enhancements.

The new feature isn’t available immediately, but will launch “soon” to Apple beta testers. (In addition to developers, Apple now allows the public to beta test its software). It will then launch later this month for all customers. Apple didn’t offer an exact launch date, but one has to guess that it wants the feature available before all the holiday parties have wrapped, we’d imagine.

Specifically, the feature works on the iPhone 11 and later or iPhone SE (3rd generation), the iPad Pro 11-inch (3rd generation and later), iPad Air (4th generation and later), iPad mini (6th generation), or iPad (9th generation and later), and the Apple TV 4K (3rd generation).

Lyrics has been one of the areas where Apple had led its top rival Spotify in years past, as Spotify failed to get deals done to include lyrics in its product across global markets. That changed in November 2021, when Spotify finally rolled out real-time lyrics to its user base. Now Apple is jumping ahead once again, and with a feature it’s said has been a “labor of love” its team has worked on for the past couple of years. And, if it gains traction, Apple Sing could encourage people to make the jump or to subscribe for the first time. Spotify, meanwhile, was said to be working on a karaoke feature of its own, it has not become broadly available.

Apple Music is getting a new karaoke-like feature, Apple Sing by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Telegram Premium has amassed over 1 million subscribers, less than six months after the popular instant messaging app launched the paid offering and began a serious effort to monetize the business.

Pavel Durov shared the update on his Telegram channel Tuesday, calling the milestone “one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched.”

The subscription, however, still “represents just a fraction of Telegram’s overall revenue,” he shared in the same update, optimistically hoping that one day Premium will rake in just as much money as ads.

The app, used by over 700 million monthly active users, launched Premium in late June, offering customers a range of additional features such as the ability to send files as large as 4 GB and faster downloads. The monthly subscription costs about $6 in the U.S. and the UK, and $2.2 in emerging markets such as India.

Telegram’s push to monetization comes at a time when its chief rival, WhatsApp, is also scrambling to find ways to make money. WhatsApp remains free and has no paid tier, but its parent firm Meta is increasingly bringing businesses to the instant messaging app. The firm appears to have dialled up its effort in recent months — and not everyone is happy about it.

The Dubai-headquartered Telegram, which has said in the past that it needed to make money to keep the platform afloat, citing computing costs,plans to expand its monetization efforts next year, Durov said. The firm is developing a host of decentralized tools, including non-custodial wallets and exchanges, he said late last month.

“Thanks to successful monetization, Telegram will be able to pay for the servers, traffic and wages necessary to keep building new features and supporting existing ones. While some other apps consider their users a tool to maximize revenue, we consider revenue a tool to maximize value for our users,” he wrote Tuesday.

Telegram Premium tops 1 million subscribers by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch