Avoiding a different type of lock-in, Google last week announced that privacy-safe search engine DuckDuckGo won its auction to be offered as an alternative search provider in Android devices across all 31 European markets. The auction was a result of anti-trust action by the European Union. Info.com will also appear in all markets while PrivacyWall, Qwant, Yandex, and GMX split third place.
If your definition of joy is running omni-channel retail on an iPhone, then NewStore is your new best friend. They promise their one system does everything, which may appeal to people who doubt that integrating lots of systems can really be simple. Newstore just raised $20 million in new funding from backers including Salesforce Ventures, bringing their total to $130 million.
Enough about enterprise software. All you Citizen Developers will want to know that Google has just bought AppSheet, a no-code development platform. It can build processes that use data from pretty much any cloud source including Google Sheets, Forms, Maps, and Analytics, as well as non-Google platforms including Salesforce, Dropbox, AWS DynamoDB and MySQL.
Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike. Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else. Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed. It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.