EU regulations and US court rulings are loosening Google and Apple’s control over app store purchases. One beneficiary is Appcharge, which provides alternative technologies for direct-to-consumer sales by mobile game developers. They’ve grown 14x in the past twelve months and just raised a $58 million Series B, only nine months after a $26 million Series A.

We reported last week that IT staff are very pleased with how well they’re preparing customer data. Data consumers are less satisfied: this Ascend2 report for data governance vendor Collibra finds that 40% of data governance, risk and compliance professionals don’t trust their data and 62% say data quality is the top area needing improvement. When it comes to building AI models, data reliability is the top challenge (53%), outweighing compliance (45%) and risk (41%).

CDP Zeta Global has unveiled Athena, a “superintelligent” voice-activated interface that delivers instant answers, smarter decisions, and agentic actions throughout the Zeta platform. It activates a suite of agentic apps that can adapt to each user’s specific goals and styles. Early access will begin later this year, with a suite of agentic apps to follow in the first half of next year.