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These 10 enterprise M&A deals totaled over $87 billion this year

Published December 19, 2018

M&A activity was brisk in the enterprise market this year, with 10 high-profile deals totaling almost $88 billion. Companies were opening up their wallets and pouring money into mega acquisitions. It’s worth noting that the $88 billion figure doesn’t include Dell paying investors more than $23 billion for VMware tracking stock to take the company public again or several other deals of over a billion dollars that didn’t make our list.

Last year’s big deals included Intel buying MobileEye for $15 billion and Cisco getting AppDynamics for $3.7 billion, but there were not as many big ones. Adobe, which made two large acquisitions this year, was mostly quiet last year, only making a minor purchase. Salesforce too was mostly quiet in 2017, only buying a digital creative agency, after an active 2016. SAP also made only one purchase in 2017, paying $350 million for Gigya. Microsoft was active buying nine companies, but these were primarily minor. Perhaps everyone was saving their pennies for 2018.

This year, by contrast, was go big or go home, and we saw action across the board from the usual suspects. Large companies looking to change their fortunes or grow their markets went shopping and came home with some expensive trinkets for their collections. Some of the deals are still waiting to pass regulatory hurdles and won’t be closing until 2019. Regardless, it’s too soon to judge whether these big-bucks ventures will pay the dividends that their buyers hope, or if they end up being M&A dust in the wind.

IBM acquires Red Hat for $34 billion

By far the biggest and splashiest deal of the year goes to IBM, which bet the farm to acquire Red Hat for a staggering $34 billion. IBM sees this acquisition as a way to build out its hybrid cloud business. It’s a huge bet and one that could determine the success of Big Blue as an organization in the coming years.

Broadcom nets CA Technologies for $18.5 billion

This deal was unexpected, as Broadcom, a chip maker, spent the second largest amount of money in a year of big spending. What Broadcom got for its many billions was an old-school IT management and software solutions provider. Perhaps Broadcom felt it needed to branch out beyond pure chip making, and CA offered a way to do it, albeit a rather expensive one.

SAP buys Qualtrics for $8 billion

While not anywhere close to the money IBM or Broadcom spent, SAP went out and nabbed Qualtrics last month just before the company was about to IPO, still paying a healthy $8 billion. The company believes that the new company could help build a bridge between SAP operational data inside its back-end ERP systems and Qualtrics customer data on the front end. Time will tell if they are right.

Microsoft gets GitHub for $7.5 billion

In June, Microsoft swooped in and bought GitHub, giving it a key developer code repository. It was a lot of money to pay, and Diane Greene expressed regret that Google hadn’t been able to get it. That’s because cloud companies are working hard to win developer hearts and minds. Microsoft has a chance to push GitHub users toward its products, but it has to tread carefully because they will balk if Microsoft goes too far.

Salesforce snares MuleSoft for $6.5 billion

Salesforce wasn’t about to be left out of the party in 2018 and in March, the CRM giant announced it was buying API integration vendor Mulesoft for a cool $6.5 billion. It was a big deal for Salesforce, which tends to be acquisitive, but typically on smaller deals. This one was a key purchase though because it gives the company the ability to access data wherever it lives, on premises or in the cloud, and that could be key for them moving forward.

Adobe snags Marketo for $4.75 billion

Adobe has built a strong company primarily on the strength of its Creative Cloud, but it has been trying to generate more revenue on the marketing side of the business. To that end, it acquired Marketo for $4.75 billion and immediately boosted its marketing business, especially when combined with the $1.68 billion Magento purchase earlier in the year.

SAP acquires CallidusCloud for $2.4 billion

SAP doesn’t do as many acquisitions as some of its fellow large tech companies mentioned here, but this year it did two. Not only did it buy Qualtrics for $8 billion, it also grabbed CallidusCloud for $2.4 billion. SAP is best known for managing back-office components with its ERP software, but this adds a cloud-based, front-office sales process piece to the mix.

Cisco grabs Duo Security for $2.35 billion

Cisco has been hard at work buying up a variety of software services over the years, and this year it added to its security portfolio when it acquired Duo Security for $2.35 billion. The Michigan-based company helps companies secure applications using their own mobile devices and could be a key part of the Cisco security strategy moving forward.

Twilio buys SendGrid for $2 billion

Twilio got into the act this year too. While not in the same league as the other large tech companies on this list, it saw a piece it felt would enhance its product set and it was willing to spend big to get it. Twilio, which made its name as a communications API company, saw a kindred spirit in SendGrid, spending $2 billion to get the API-based email service.

Vista snares Apttio for $1.94 billion

Vista Equity Partners is the only private equity firm on the list, but it’s one with an appetite for enterprise technology. With Apttio, it gets a company that can help companies understand their cloud assets alongside their on-prem ones. The company had been public before Vista bought it for $1.94 billion last month.

Report: Pinterest may go public as soon as April

Published December 19, 2018

Pinterest may follow Lyft and Uber to the public markets in the first half of 2019, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The visual search engine and shopping tool is expected to tap underwriters in January and complete an initial public offering as soon as April. The company was valued at just over $12 billion with its last private fundraise, a $150 million round in mid-2017, and is on pace to bring in $700 million in revenue this year.

The company, founded in 2008 by Ben Silbermann (pictured), is also in talks to secure a $500 million credit line, per the report, not an uncommon move for a pre-IPO giant like Pinterest.

To date, the company has raised nearly $1.5 billion from key stakeholders such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Fidelity and SV Angel.

Pinterest recently reached 250 million monthly active users, up from 200 million in 2017.

This year, it launched several new features to make it easier for passive Pinterest users to actually buy products on the platform, and introduced the “following” tab, where users could view only the content from brands and people they follow. It also added the Pinterest Propel program as part of an effort to create more local content for its users, and implemented full-screen video ads to beef up its advertising options — an area where it competes directly with Facebook and Google.

2019 is poised to be a banner year for venture-backed IPOs. Both Uber and Lyft are in IPO registration, filing privately to go public within hours of each other earlier this month, and Slack, too, has reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to lead its 2019 float.

Pinterest declined to comment.

Pinterest reports 25% increase in monthly active users

This project is mapping every solar panel in the country using machine learning

Published December 19, 2018

Renewable energy is the future, but at present no one is tracking just who’s got solar panels on their roof, in their back yard, or a shared neighborhood installation. Fortunately, solar panels generally work best when exposed to the light. That makes them easy to spot, and count, from orbit — which is just what the DeepSolar project is doing.

There are a number of initiatives for collecting this information — some regulated, some voluntary, some automated. But none of them is comprehensive enough or accurate enough to base policy or business decisions on at a national or state level.

Stanford engineers (mechanical and civil, respectively) Arun Majumdar and Ram Rajagopal decided to remedy this with what seems like, in retrospect, rather an obvious solution.

Machine learning systems are great at looking at images and finding objects they’ve been “trained” to recognize, whether it’s cats, faces, or cars… so why not solar panels?

Their team, including grad students Jiafan Yu and Zhecheng Wang, put together an image recognition machine learning agent trained on hundreds of thousands of satellite images. The model learns both to identify the presence of solar panels in an image, and to find the shape and area of those panels.

Having evaluated the model on nearly a hundred thousand other randomly sampled satellite images of the U.S., they found they achieved an accuracy of about 90 percent (slightly more or less depending on how it’s measured), which is well ahead of other models, and it estimated cell size with only about a 3 percent error. (Its main weakness is very small installations, Rajagopal told me, but this is partially due to the limits of the imagery.)

The team then put the model to work chewing through over a billion image tiles covering as much of the lower 48 states as they could find suitable imagery for. That excludes quite a bit of area, but consider that much of that is, for example, mountains. Not a lot of solar installations there, and few people are trying to put up cells in national parks.

All in all it’s about 6 percent of the actual country — but Rajagopal pointed out that urban areas comprise only about 3.5 percent, so this covers all of them and more. He estimated that perhaps perhaps 5 percent of installations are in the areas the system has yet to process (but is working on).

Scanning took a whole month, but at the end the model had found 1.47 million individual solar installations (which could be a few panels on a roof or a whole solar farm). That’s many more than have been counted by other efforts, and the most successful of those didn’t come with the exact location, as DeepSolar’s data does.

Basic plotting of this data produces all kinds of interesting new info. You can compare solar installation density at the state, county, census tract, or even square mile level and compare that to all kinds of other metrics — average sunny days per year, household income, voting preference, and so on.

A couple interesting findings: Only 4 percent of all census tracts (roughly 3,000 out of 75,000) had more than 100 residential-scale solar systems, meaning installations are highly concentrated. Residential solar made up 87 percent of the total installation count, but with a median size of around 25 square meters, only 34 percent of the total solar cell surface area.

Peak deployment density can be found where there are about a thousand people per square mile — think a small town or suburb, not a major city. And there’s a sort of inflection point at which people start installing: when an area receives more than 4.5 kWh per square meter per day of solar radiation. How that corresponds to weather, location, exposure and so on is a more complicated question.

This and other demographics are all good information to know if you want to invest in solar, since they basically tell you where it’s justified or needed.

“We have created and released a website where you can play with the data at the aggregated level (we are keeping it at census tract level) to respect the privacy of consumers,” Rajagopal said. “We are exploring how to make individual detections public while respecting privacy (perhaps by encouraging public participation and crowdsourcing).”

“We decided to share all of the work in open source to encourage others in industry and academia to utilize both the method as well as the data to produce more insights. We feel that changes need to happen fast, and this is one of the ways to aid in that. Perhaps in the future, services can be built around this type of data,” he continued.

Plans are underway to expand the service to the rest of the U.S. and other countries as well. The data is available to peruse here, or here as a map; the team’s paper describing the project was published today in the journal Joule.

Coinbase’s Earn.com becomes a crypto webinar with crypto rewards

Published December 19, 2018

Coinbase acquired Earn.com for at least $120 million back in April. And the company now plans to transform Earn.com into Coinbase Earn, a website with educational content to learn more about cryptocurrencies. Users who complete those classes will earn tokens.

Coinbase bought Earn.com partly so that it could appoint Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan as Coinbase’s CTO. The previous iteration of Earn.com wasn’t a priority for Coinbase.

Earn.com started as a service where you can contact busy people for a small fee. Busy people would get paid in cryptocurrencies to accept those requests. The platform quickly became a way to massively contact Earn.com’s user base for initial coin offerings and airdrops.

Coinbase buys Earn.com and makes CEO Balaji Srinivasan its first CTO

Coinbase Earn is launching today in private beta. But at the time of this article, the new Coinbase Earn service is not live (Update: Coinbase Earn is now live and is a separate website from Earn.com). Some Coinbase users will receive an invitation to the service. The company says that educational content will go beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. Developing education pages for obscure cryptocurrencies makes sense as Coinbase plans to add dozens of cryptocurrencies over the coming months.

At first, there is just one track. Users can learn more about 0x (ZRX), a protocol that lets you create decentralized exchanges. Cryptocurrency trades can be executed without a centralized exchange thanks to 0x .

0x content includes video lessons and quizzes — and yes, writing this makes me feel like it’s 2005 and webinars are cool again. Even if you’re not invited to Coinbase Earn, you can view the content. But those who are part of Coinbase Earn will receive a small amount of ZRX at the end of the track.

Coinbase had previously launched a learning hub to understand the basics of cryptocurrencies.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

Microsoft launches a new app to make using Office easier

Published December 19, 2018

Microsoft today announced a new Office app that’s now available to Windows Insiders and that will soon roll out to all Windows 10 users. The new Office app will replace the existing My Office app (yeah, those names…). While the existing app was mostly about managing Office 365 subscriptions, the new app provides significantly more features and will essentially become the central hub for Office users to switch between apps, see their pinned documents and access other Office features.

The company notes that this launch is part of its efforts to make using Office easier and help users “get the most out of Office and getting them back into their work quickly.” For many Office users, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel are basically their central tools for getting work done, so it makes sense to give them a single app that combines in a single place all the information about their work.

Using the app, users can switch between apps, see everything they’ve been working on, as well as recommended documents based on what I assume is data from the Microsoft Graph. There’s also an integrated search feature and admins will be able to customize the app with other line of business applications and their company’s branding.

The app is free and will be available in the oft-forgotten Microsoft Store. It’ll work for all users with Office 365 subscriptions or access to Office 2019, Office 2016 or Office Online.

Google’s Cloud Spanner database adds new features and regions

Published December 19, 2018

Cloud Spanner, Google’s globally distributed relational database service, is getting a bit more distributed today with the launch of a new region and new ways to set up multi-region configurations. The service is also getting a new feature that gives developers deeper insights into their most resource-consuming queries.

With this update, Google is adding to the Cloud Spanner lineup Hong Kong (asia-east2), its newest data center location. With this, Cloud Spanner is now available in 14 out of 18 Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions, including seven the company added this year alone. The plan is to bring Cloud Spanner to every new GCP region as they come online.

The other new region-related news is the launch of two new configurations for multi-region coverage. One, called eur3, focuses on the European Union, and is obviously meant for users there who mostly serve a local customer base. The other is called nam6 and focuses on North America, with coverage across both costs and the middle of the country, using data centers in Oregon, Los Angeles, South Carolina and Iowa. Previously, the service only offered a North American configuration with three regions and a global configuration with three data centers spread across North America, Europe and Asia.

While Cloud Spanner is obviously meant for global deployments, these new configurations are great for users who only need to serve certain markets.

As far as the new query features are concerned, Cloud Spanner is now making it easier for developers to view, inspect and debug queries. The idea here is to give developers better visibility into their most frequent and expensive queries (and maybe make them less expensive in the process).

In addition to the Cloud Spanner news, Google Cloud today announced that its Cloud Dataproc Hadoop and Spark service now supports the R language, in addition to Python 3.7 support on App Engine.

Devcon raises $4.5M to beef up adtech security

Published December 19, 2018

Adtech cybersecurity company Devcon announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.

Over the past couple of years, ad fraud has become a bigger concern in the industry, but Devcon co-founder and CEO Maggie Louie said most existing solutions focus on things like verifying ad quality and confirming that impressions aren’t coming from bots. Devcon, in contrast, functions more like “a Norton AntiVirus of adtech,” preventing attempts by bad actors who are “using adtech as a catalyst to attack consumers and companies.”

In other words, Louie said Devcon works with ad networks and publishers to “eliminate 99 percent of the nefarious things that are making their way through the system.” It says it can block malicious ads on an individual basis, whether they include pop-ups and redirects or unauthorized tag injectors. Customers can then view the individually blocked ads and see where they came from, and there’s also a dashboard that shows how much money is being lost to fraud.

Louie pointed to the recent DOJ indictment of eight individuals allegedly involved in a digital ad fraud scheme as a sign that the issue is becoming more serious.

“Some of these attacks have some very concerning potential outcomes [for consumers], so being able to stop those before they get out is akin to stopping a water contamination at the source level,” she added.

At the same time, she argued that this is a particularly challenging area for security, because there’s been “a lack of crossover between cybersecurity and ad ops,” leading to a dearth of “security people or cybersecurity people who understand adtech.”

In contrast, the Devcon team combines media veterans like Louie (who was recently vice president of audience at the Athens Banner-Herald and also worked at the Los Angeles Times) with “white hat” hackers like co-founder and CTO Josh Summitt (who was previously on the ethical hacking team at Bank of America). It’s also hired former FBI Cyber Squad Supervisor Michael F. D. Anaya as its head of global cyber investigations and government relations.

In fact, Devcon says it assisted law enforcement in the first-ever conviction for online ad theft and money laundering, which resulted in a four-year prison sentence.

Devcon was founded in Memphis, Tenn., but has since expanded its headquarters to Atlanta, and it was part of this year’s Techstars Barclay accelerator in London. The seed funding was led by Las Olas VC — among other things, Louie said it will allow Devcon to further develop its machine learning technology to automatically identify emerging threats.

PetaGene scores $2.1M in funding for its genomics data compression technology

Published December 19, 2018

PetaGene, the Cambridge, U.K.-based genomics data compression startup, has raised $2.1 million in further funding. Leading the round is U.S. venture firm Romulus Capital, with participation from other unnamed investors Silicon Valley and London. It brings total funding to $3.2 million.

Previous investor Entrepreneur First, the company builder backed by Greylock Partners, also followed on. PetaGene is an alumnus of EF6, although notably its two founders Dan Greenfield and Vaughan Wittorff already knew each other from their time at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge University. Both hold PhDs from Cambridge University, too.

The new funding will be used by the company to grow its technical team based in Cambridge, its global sales team, and further expand PetaGene’s product offerings. I’m also told the new funding comes off the back of signing a large contract with a major undisclosed pharmaceutical company.

“As whole genome sequencing becomes more and more commonplace, the amount of data it creates places great strain on infrastructure. We help organisations with managing that data,” says PetaGene co-founder Dan Greenfield. “Through our compression technology, we make that data up to ten times smaller and faster to transfer for research and analysis, democratising precision medicine in the process”.

As it stands, the storage and processing of genomics data adds a significant extra cost and acts as a bottleneck for how fast data can be worked with. By some estimates genomics data will reach 40 exabytes per year by 2025 (exabytes, by the way, is a lot of data!). Therefore, better file compression technology has the potential to be a major enabler of innovation and research based on genomics, including developing new personalised medicine and treatments.

Key to this, PetaGene says its software enables compression of huge amounts of genomic data without compromising on access and data quality. The company claims its products go beyond regular data reduction techniques.

“We have dedicated extensive R&D to building extremely high performance compressors for genomic data, the result being that we outperform existing state-of-the-art compression, sometimes by a factor of 6x or more,” explains Greenfield.

“At the same time our customers want to be assured that the original file can be exactly recovered. Other compression solutions unfortunately aren’t able to restore the original file, and can even sometimes discard or modify internal content without telling their users. We’ve spent a great deal of effort to make sure we preserve the original file bit-for-bit, even providing commercial guarantees to our customers. I can’t really go into the details of our secret sauce here, but we’re very proud of our industry-leading performance, and we continue to keep improving it”.

Krishna K. Gupta, founder and general partner of Romulus Capital, says he was impressed by the part of the genomics value chain PetaGene is targeting, which led the firm to first invest in 2017. “Since then, their ability to successfully develop their product for the cloud and the strong interest from potential customers have only served to reinforce our view,” he says.

Meanwhile, PetaGene’s target customers span pharmaceutical companies, academic research institutions, clinical labs in hospitals, and genomic sequencing companies.

“Our clients pay for our software according to the savings they make,” adds the PetaGene co-founder. “The greater the reduction in size of their data files, the more revenue we receive, and the more they are saving in storage and data transfer costs. We don’t charge our clients for accessing or decompressing the compressed data”.

Teeth aligner startup Candid opens physical location in SF

Published December 19, 2018

Candid, a teeth aligner startup that aims to make straight teeth more accessible and more affordable than Invisalign, is evolving its direct-to-consumer business. In addition to its at-home impression process, Candid recently started enabling people to come into a physical office to get their teeth scans completed.

Today, Candid is opening physical storefronts in San Francisco, Austin, Columbus, Ohio and Santa Monica, Calif. This is in addition to the two locations in New York City, one in Boston and one in West Hollywood, Calif. By the end of next year, Candid aims to have 75 locations across the U.S.

Candid, which 3D prints its FDA-approved aligners, is designed for people who need mild to moderate orthodontic work. It costs $1,900 upfront or $88 per month over two years, while braces can cost up to $7,000 and Invisalign can cost up to $8,000.

In Candid’s physical locations, customers can get their teeth scanned and order aligners within 30 minutes. The studios are operated by Candid’s orthodontists and dental assistants.

This is on the heels of Candid’s $15 million Series A round led by Greycroft last November. SmileDirectClub, a major competitor of Candid, raised $380 million in October at a $3.2 billion valuation.

But Candid doesn’t seem too fazed, having seen 15x growth year over year and expecting to potentially raise more funding in Q1 of next year, CEO Nick Greenfield told TechCrunch.

“The advantage is, if you don’t have access or live two hours away from the city, the impression kit is a viable and effective way,” Greenfield said. “But if you live in a city with a Candid studio, we recommend you come in for a scan.”

This is similar to Uniform Teeth’s strategy. Uniform Teeth, which raised $4 million earlier this year, is a clear teeth aligner startup that competes with the likes of Invisalign and Smile Direct Club. The startup takes a One Medical-like approach in that it provides real, licensed orthodontists to see you and treat your bite.

It’s worth noting that the in-person approach aligns more with the values of the American Association of Orthodontists, which has taken issue with the likes of SmileDirectClub and other teeth-straightening services that don’t require in-person visits with a licensed orthodontist.

As Candid grows and opens more physical locations, it wouldn’t be surprising if the company starts to try to funnel more people through the door than through the virtual shopping cart.

Tech startups want to go inside your mouth

Consumer advocacy groups call on FTC to investigate kids’ apps on Google Play

Published December 19, 2018

A coalition of 22 consumer and public health advocacy groups, led by Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), have today filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking them to investigate and sanction Google for how its Google Play Store markets apps to children. The complaint states that Google features apps designed for very young children in its Play Store’s “Family” section, many of which are violating federal children’s privacy law, exposing kids to inappropriate content and disregarding Google’s own policies by luring kids into making in-app purchases and watching ads.

Google Play ‘Family’ section

Google first introduced its “Designed for Families” program back in 2015, which gives developers of kid-friendly apps meeting certain guidelines additional visibility in the Play Store. This includes a placement in the Family section, where apps are organized by age appropriateness.

To qualify, “Family” apps must abide by specific content policies, Google’s Developer Distribution Agreement and the Designed for Families DDA Addendum. The apps also must meet the Designed for Families program requirements. Legal compliance with federal privacy laws, including COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule), are among the requirements.

COPPA is designed to protect children under the age of 13 by giving parents control over what information sites and apps can collect from their kids.

Above: Google Play store showcases children’s content in its own dedicated sections

COPPA violations

But the new FTC complaint claims that Google is not verifying COPPA compliance when it accepts these apps and, as a result, many are in continual violation of the law.

“Our research revealed a surprising number of privacy violations on Android apps for children, including sharing geolocation with third parties,” said Serge Egelman, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement shared by the group. “Given Google’s assertion that Designed for Families apps must be COPPA compliant, it’s disappointing these violations still abound, even after Google was alerted to the scale of the problem,” he added.

TechCrunch asked the coalition if it had some idea about how many apps were in violation of COPPA, and were told the groups don’t know an exact number.

“From our survey — and more comprehensive analyses like the PET Study — it seems fairly prevalent,” Lindsey Barrett, Staff Attorney at Georgetown’s Institute for Public Representation, told us.

“The PET Study found that 73 percent of the kids apps in the Play store transmitted sensitive data over the internet, and we saw apps sending geolocation without notice and verifiable parental consent, and sending personal information unencrypted,” Barrett said. “Further, under COPPA, children’s PII cannot be used for behavioral advertising. Yet, many of the children’s apps we looked at were sending information to ad networks which say their services should not be used with children’s apps,” she added.

Other harms

The apps also engage in other bad behaviors, like regularly showing ads that are difficult to exit or showing those that require viewing in order to continue the current game, according to the complaint. Some apps pressure kids into making in-app purchases — in one example, the game characters were crying if the kids didn’t buy the locked items, it notes. Others show ads for alcohol and gambling, despite those being barred by Google’s Ad Policy.

Above: disturbing images from TabTale apps

The coalition additionally called out some apps for containing “graphic, sexualized images” like TutoTOONS “Sweet Baby Girl Daycare 4 – Babysitting Fun,” which has more than 10 million downloads. (The game has a part where kids change a baby’s diaper, wipe their diaper area, then rub powder all over the baby’s body.) Others model harmful behavior, like TabTale’s “Crazy Eye Clinic,” which teaches children to clean their eyes with a sharp instrument, and has more than one million downloads. (The game is currently not available on Google Play and its webpage is down.)

The complaint also broadly takes issue with apps that use common SDKs like those from Unity or Flurry (disclosure: Flurry and TechCrunch share a corporate parent) to collect device identifiers from the children’s apps.

“Nearly three-quarters of the apps in the Family section transmit device identifiers to third parties,” reads the complaint. “There is no way for us to know for sure what the device identifiers are used for. Since many of the apps send device identifiers to third parties that specialize in monetizing apps and/or engaging in interest-based (behavioral) advertising, it seems unlikely that this information is being used solely to support internal operations,” it says.

Above: Strawberry Shortcake Puppy Palace was called out for aggressive monetization efforts. Strawberry tells kids to buy things to keep the puppy happy — the implication is if you don’t pay, you’re making puppies sad.

The groups say that Google has been aware of all these problems for some time, but hasn’t taken adequate steps to enforce its criteria for developers. As a result, the consumer advocacy groups are urging the FTC to investigate the Play Store’s practices.

The coalition had previously asked the FTC to investigate developers of children’s apps aimed at preschoolers who were using manipulative advertising. But today’s complaint is focused on Google.

“Google (Alphabet, Inc.) has long engaged in unethical and harmful business practices, especially when it comes to children,” explained Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “And the Federal Trade Commission has for too long ignored this problem, placing both children and their parents at risk over their loss of privacy, and exposing them to a powerful and manipulative marketing apparatus. As one of the world’s leading providers of content for kids online, Google continues to put the enormous profits they make from kids ahead of any concern for their welfare,” Chester said.

Apple was not similarly called out because a similar analysis has not yet been done on its app marketplace, Josh Golin, executive director at CCFC told us. In Google’s case, he explained, two major studies found widespread issues with the Play Store apps for kids. One from Berkeley researchers found widespread COPPA non-compliance; the other, by University of Michigan researchers, found children’s play experience was often completely interrupted and undermined by aggressive marketing tactics.

The complaint comes at a time where there is increased scrutiny as to how tech companies are misusing and abusing consumer data and violating privacy. Kids game have already been the subject of some concern. And this morning, an NYT investigation into Facebook revealed it had shared more of users’ personal data than disclosed with major tech companies, following a year of data scandals.

The issue of data privacy is an industry-wide problem. Tech companies’ failures on this front will likely lead to increased regulation going forward.

Not all the named developers were immediately available to comment this morning. We’ll update if comments are provided. (Update: TutoToons says they removed the inappropriate content from the app after becoming aware of the complaint. They urged parents and child advocacy groups to reach out to them directly in the future.)

Google says it’s taking the complaint seriously. It has removed thousands of apps from its Designed for Families program this year, and rejects a third of applications.

“Parents want their children to be safe online and we work hard to protect them. Apps in our Designed for Families program have to comply with strict policies on content, privacy and advertising, and we take action on any policy violations that we find,” a Google spokesperson says. “We take these issues very seriously and continue to work hard to remove any content that is inappropriately aimed at children from our platform,” they added.

The full complaint is below.

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