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Digital ad spending in the United States exceeding $100 billion for the first time last year, according to the latest internet advertising report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Specifically, total domestic spending reached $107.5 billion, a 22 percent increase from 2017. Mobile advertising has become increasingly dominant, growing 40 percent year-over-year, to $69.9 billion. And video ad spending grew 37 percent to $16.3 billion.

Sue Hogan, the IAB’s senior vice president of research and measurement, said that in the past, mobile ad spend has lagged behind time spent on those devices. But now, she said, “That parity is almost being reached. Eyeballs are being followed by dollars.”

PwC partner David Silverman acknowledged that this leads to an obvious follow-up: Once ad dollars catch up to consumer attention, will growth slow? In Silverman’s view, “the industry has found ways to evolve” in the past, and it will again.

“There’s other shifts that are occurring now,” he added, pointing to the growth in digital audio advertising (up 23 percent to $2.3 billion), as well as other areas like out-of-home advertising and bringing ads to new devices.

One of the recurring concerns about the digital ad industry is its dominance by Facebook and Google. While the IAB report doesn’t single out specific companies, it does measure concentration in terms of how much spending is going to the top 10 ad sellers. In 2018, those sellers collected 77 percent of total spending — the IAB says the percentage has fluctuated between 69 percent and 77 percent in the past decade.

As for the effect of GDPR and other privacy regulation, Silverman said, “It certainly will have a significant impact, particularly on the use of data and AI in making advertisements more relevant and more effective” — but he suggested it’s too early to say precisely what the financial impact will be.

Hogan suggested that the California Consumer Protection Act could be more influential on U.S. ad spend. The IAB (which is a trade group representing online advertisers and publishers) has been advocating for federal regulation, rather than a state-by-state approach.

“I hope that we don’t get to the point where it becomes a strain on the industry,” she said. “I think more and more education is needed around that.”

Facebook’s efforts to shut down harmful and malicious content on its platform have landed it in a European courtroom, after an anti-drug abuse organization in Poland claimed that a freeze on its Facebook Pages is a violation of its rights to free speech.

The Civil Society Drug Policy Initiative (Społeczna Inicjatywa Narkopolityki in Polish, which goes by the slightly unfortunate abbreviation of ‘SIN’) says that it has filed a complaint with the District Court of Warsaw against Facebook for violating articles 23-24 of the Polish Civil Code, which ensures free speech for individuals and organizations.

SIN says that Facebook deleted several of its pages on Facebook and Instagram for violating its community standards in 2018 and 2019 (here, here, here, here, here, and one page that appears to have been claimed by someone else in the interim). Another page SIN set up after the others were shut down appears to still be up for now.

SIN is asking for Facebook to reinstate its Pages and its followers, and to apologise publicly for its actions.

When contacted for a response, Facebook declined to comment on the case.

SIN describes itself as a Polish NGO that runs educational activities to make people aware of the harmful consequences of drug use, and provides assistance to people drug abusers.

The group is being supported in its legal action by lawyers working pro-bono with a Polish non-profit called Panoptykon, which was set up in 2009 to find and help fight cases against tech companies where it believes personal rights are being violated in our current “surveillance society” (its description, and also the reason for the panopticon reference).

Panoptykon is a busy group these days: another case that it filed against Google and the IAB in Poland over targeted advertising recently got referred up to the authorities in Ireland (where many cases are heard as a result of the country being home to many global HQs) and Belgium (home of the European Commission.

It’s not exactly clear what Facebook found offensive in SIN’s content since Facebook declined to respond.

From the looks of it, SIN itself does not take your typical “don’t do drugs” approach but instead focuses on the concept of harm reduction. It sets up a presence at clubs, festivals and other events where people might take recreational drugs. Then, it “leave[s] the assumption that it’s best not to start using drugs, or to stop if you do so [since] it’s not always possible. If you are already using, we educate on how to do it with least damage possible.” It also offers methods for testing drugs and advice on what different drugs can do.

SIN notes that the UN, the EU, the National Bureau for the Prevention of Drug Addiction; Red Cross; Doctors Without Borders and many others support this approach.

However, it may be that its native approach appeared to Facebook’s algorithms as similar to groups that advocate using drugs. Alternatively, it may be that Facebook regarded SIN as taking a particular approach on a controversial subject — the best way to cope with illegal drug use — which would have run afoul of its guidelines. “The main goal of our action is to make sure that regardless of what decisions you make at parties, you have fun and keep it safe,” SIM notes on its site.

Social media platforms have come under fire for how their efforts to contain malicious or harmful content occasionally backfire by sometimes penalising more innocent accounts by mistake. Similarly, there have been accusations that rules designed by regulators to prevent harmful content on social media are partly responsible for the platforms mandating particularly stringent controls, which ironically end up violating the exact rights that regulators are trying to ensure, like free speech.

Facebook — which has had its share of heat from European regulators over issues like violations of personal privacy, data breaches, and the role it plays in helping to police its platform against abuses and misuse in democratic processes — has been working to improve the nuance of its controls, by making it more transparent to users when it has taken certain actions like shutting down pages or blocking content, and why. Panoptykon says that it believes this legal action, if successful, could help that evolution along.

“We hope that SIN vs Facebook will incentivize the portal to make further changes and implement ‘due process,’ thus establishing the standards also for other platforms,” Panoptykon notes. “In addition, with SIN vs Facebook we strive not only to persuade the platforms to create better internal procedures, but also to ensure that users who do not agree with their decisions can challenge them before an independent, external body, such as a court.”

The FBI have arrested several people suspected of involvement in running Deep Dot Web, a website for facilitating access to dark web sites and marketplaces.

Two suspects were arrested in Tel Aviv and Ashdod, according to Israel’s Tel Aviv Police, which confirmed the arrests in a statement earlier in the day, Local media first reported the arrests.

Arrests were also made in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Brazil.

Deep Dot Web is said to have made millions of dollars in commission by offering referral links to dark web marketplaces, accessible only at an .onion domain used specifically by the Tor anonymity network. Tor bounces internet traffic through a series of random relay servers dotted across the world, making it near-impossible to trace the user.

Its .onion site displayed a seized notice by the FBI, citing U.S. money laundering laws. Its clear web domain no longer loads.

Tuesday’s arrests follow an earlier operation by U.S. and German authorities earlier in the week that took down the Wall Street Market, one of the largest remaining dark web marketplaces. Thousands of sellers sold drugs, weapons and stolen credentials used to break into online accounts.

Efforts to reach Deep Dot Web over encrypted chat were unsuccessful.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FBI did not immediately comment. A spokesperson for the Israeli consulate in New York did not respond to a request for comment.

Fli Charge Technology is today announcing it was acquired by an affiliate of Birch Lake Associates. As part of the purchase, industry veteran Khalid Zitouni is taking offer the chief executive position as the company looks to expand its reach for Fli Charge’s clever power delivery technology.

TechCrunch first spied Fli Charge at CES 2018 when the company demonstrated its tech with Craftsman power tools. Once a Fli Charge device is placed on the strip, charging starts immediately at the same rate as if it was plugged into an outlet. Four small conductive nubs make contact with the pad and serve up power as needed. The system is capable of simultaneously charging batteries of different voltages. One strip can charge a smartphone, power tool, and laptop at the same time even though each device has different power requirements.

Fli Charge tech could bring the convenience wireless charging to new industries. That’s where Birch Lake comes in.

“The FLI Charge technology is a clear outlier in the power and charging space,” said FLI Charge’s incoming Chief Executive Officer, Khalid Zitouni. “While it resembles wireless charging solutions on the market today, it is not constrained by the limitations that have held back those technologies from garnering significant market adoption or expanding into new product categories. We are excited to rapidly expand our consumer product offerings and continue to develop a robust licensing platform for all portable products including power tools, IOT devices, drones, audio products and small appliances, among others.”

Zitouni is taking over for former Fli Charge CEO, Cliff Weinstein, who is staying on as company consultant. In 2017 Weinstein led a management buyout to take Fli Charge private and after the debut of an early version of the product on Indiegogo in 2016.

When I spoke to Weinstein at CES 2018 he was optimistic about a future where Fli Charge’s technology was built into desks and tool boxes, allowing office workers and construction workers alike to live a cord-free life. Now, with Birch Lake taking the company forward, that future could be nearer than ever. Fli Charge’s implementation of wireless power delivery is impressive and adopted by the market, could lead to a truly wireless future.

Fli Charge demonstration at CES 2018

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Sitting silently with your eyes closed isn’t fun but it’s good for you…so you probably don’t meditate as often as you’d like. In that sense it’s quite similar to exercise. But people do show up when prodded by the urgency and peer pressure of scheduled group cycling or aerobics classes. What’s still in the way is actually hauling your lazy butt to the gym, hence the rise of Peloton’s in-home stationary bike with attached screen streaming live and on-demand classes. My butt is particularly lazy, but I’ve done 80 Peloton rides in 4 months. The model works.

Now that model is coming to mindfulness with the launch of Journey LIVE, a subscription iOS app offering live 15-minute group meditation classes. With sessions starting most waking hours, instructors that interact with you directly, and a sense of herd mentality, you feel compelled to dedicate the time to clearing your thoughts. By video and voice, the teachers introduce different meditation theories and practices, guide you through, and answer questions you can type in. Each day, Journey also provides a newly recorded on-demand session in case you need a class on your own schedule.

“‘I tried Headspace’ or ‘I tried Calm’ . With a lot of the current meditation apps, people go on but they drop off very quickly” says Journey founder and CEO Stephen Sokoler. “It means that there’s an interest in meditating and having a better life but people fall off because meditating alone is hard, it’s confusing, it’s boring. Meditating with a live teacher who can connect with you and say your name, who makes you feel seen and heard makes huge difference.”

Journey subscriptions start at $19.99 per month after a week-long free trial. That feels a bit steep, but prices drop to $7.99 if paid annually with the launch discount, or you can dive in with a $399 lifetime pass. The challenge will be keeping users from abandoning meditation and then their subscription without resorting to growth hacking and annoying notifications that are antithetical to the whole concept. Journey has now raised a $2.4M seed round led by Canaan and joined by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Betaworks, and more to get the company rolling.

Sokoler’s own journey could set an example of the possibilities of sticking with it. “Meditation changed my life. I was fortunate enough to move to Australia, find a book on Buddhism, and then I had the willpower to start practicing meditation every day” he tells me. “I lost 85 pounds. People ask me how I lost the weight and they expect me to say a diet like keto or Atkins, but it was because of the program I was in.” Suddenly able to sit quietly with himself, Sokoler didn’t need food to stay occupied or feel at ease.

The founder saw the need for new sources of happiness while working in employee rewards and recognition for 12 years. He built up a company that makes momentos for commemorating big business deals. Meditation proved to him the value of developing inner quiet, whether to inspire happiness, calm, focus, or deeper connections to other people and the world. Yet the popular meditation apps ignored thousands of years of tradition when meditation would be taught in groups that give a naturally ethereal activity more structure. He founded Journey in 2015 to bring meditation to corporate environments, but now is hoping to democratize access with the launch of Journey LIVE.

“You could think of it as a real-life meditation community or studio in the palm of your hand” Sokoler explains. Instructors greet you when you join a session in the Journey app and can give you a shout-out for practicing multiple days in a row. They help you concentrate on your breath while giving enough instruction to keep you from falling asleep. You can see or hide a list of screen names of other participants that make you feel less isolated and encourage you not to quit.

Finding a market amidst the popular on-demand meditation apps will be an uphill climb for Journey LIVE. While classes recorded a long time ago might not be as engaging, they’re convenient and can dig deep into certain styles and intentions. Calm and Headspace run around $12.99 per month, making them cheaper than Journey LIVE and potentially easier to scale.

But Sokoler says his app’s beta testing saw better retention than competitors. “If you’ve ever been to the New York Public Library, there’s so many books versus going to a local curated bookstore where something is right there for you. This is much more approachable, much more accessible” Sokoler tells me. “There’s a paradox of choice and having so many options makes it hard for people to stick with it and come back every single day.”

With our phones and Netflix erasing the downtime we used to rely on to give our brain a break or reflect on our day, life is starting to feel claustrophobic. We’re tense, anxious, and easily overwhelmed. Meditation could be the antidote. Unlike with cycling or weightlifting, you don’t need some expensive Peloton bike or Tonal home gym. What you need is consistency, and an impetus to slow down for fifteen minutes you could easily squander. We’re a tribal species, and Journey LIVE group classes could use camaraderie to lure us into the satisfying void of nirvana.

When Espagon launched last Fall, the Israeli startup had an idea to monitor serverless, architectures, specifically AWS Lambda. But the company didn’t want to confine itself to monitoring a narrow class of applications, and today it announced it is now able to monitor a broader set of microservice development approaches.

CEO and co-founder Nitzan Shapira says when it launched, the startup wanted to take aim at serverless and Lambda seemed to be the prime tool for doing that. “Our product was basically a tracing, troubleshooting and monitoring tool that was automatically doing all of that for the Lambda ecosystem. And and since then, we’ve seen actually a bigger shift [beyond] just Lambda,” he said.

That shift was to a broader view of this kind of deployment across a set of modern applications involving microservices. When developers move to these modern approaches, it becomes impossible to launch an agent to help monitor what’s happening. Yet the developers still need visibility into the applications.

To help, the company is launching a tracing and logging tool together, a first for this type of monitoring, according to Shapira. “Today, with engineering and DevOps working closer than ever, being able to automatically trace microservices applications without using an agent and combine the tracing and the logging in one platform is extremely valuable,” he said.

Shapria says that over time the company plans to expand this idea and support more frameworks out of the box to allow this kind of open tracing across different tools. “We need to provide support for more and more frameworks becoming popular. Lambda is just one framework,” he explained.

Serverless is somewhat of a misnomer. The servers are still there, but instead of programming to launch on a particular server, virtual machine (VM) or set of VMs, the cloud infrastructure vendor provides whatever infrastructure resources a developer requires at any given moment automatically.

Microservices encompass the idea that instead of building a monolithic application, you break it down into a series of smaller services, typically launching them in containers and orchestrating the containers in a tool like Kubernetes.

The company only came out of stealth last October, so it’s still early days, but it is already expanding, opening a sales office in the US with a 4-person staff. The engineering team remains in Israel. It is approaching 20 employees in total.

Shapria wouldn’t talk about exact customer numbers, but says the company has hundreds of users now and is doubling the number of paying customers every month.

A security lapse at Canada’s fourth largest cell network Freedom Mobile exposed customer data.

Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found an Elasticsearch server leaking five million logs containing customer data. The server wasn’t protected with a password, allowing anyone to access the data.

Rotem and Locar, who shared their findings exclusively with TechCrunch and published his report at vpnMentor, said it took the cell giant a week to secure the leaking database after first reaching out.

The database is believed to be part of a logging system used by the company to determine errors and glitches in the company’s systems. The database recorded any errors and the plaintext data associated with it, including customer data.

Data seen by TechCrunch reveals customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, dates of birth, customer types, and Freedom Mobile account numbers.

The logs also answers to credit checks filed through Equifax, including details if an application was accepted or rejected — along with the reason why.

We also found full credit card numbers, expiry dates and verification numbers stored in plaintext.

None of the data was encrypted.

Freedom Mobile has more than 1.5 million customers across Canada, according to its latest financial earnings. Chethan Lakshman, a spokesperson for Freedom Mobile’s parent company Shaw Communications, said about 15,000 customers were affected.

“We have discovered that the data that was exposed was contained to a very small number of customers who had opened or made any changes to their accounts at 17 Freedom Mobile retail locations from March 25 to April 15, and any customers who made changes or opened accounts on April 16,” he said. “Our investigation has revealed that a very limited amount of Freedom Mobile customer data was exposed as the result of a misconfigured server managed by Apptium, a new third-party service provider Freedom Mobile has engaged to streamline our retail customer support processes.”

A forensic investigation is underway, the spokesperson said.

Apptium did not return a request for comment.

It’s the latest in a string of data exposures following security lapses that failed to secure databases with basic security measures. Earlier this year, Rotem and Locar found Chinese online shopping giant Gearbest inadvertently exposed millions of customer orders. Now, the researchers say the Freedom Mobile data leak could be one of Canada’s largest. The closest was Bell Canada’s data breach in 2017, in which hackers took more than 1.9 million customer records.

Access to credit card data and credit score data would be a boon for fraudsters and identity thieves wanting to cash in.

A spokesperson for Canada’s data protection authority, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, confirmed it “received a breach report related to Freedom Mobile,” and “will be examining the report in order to determine next steps.”

Read more:

• Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system
• A leaky database of SMS text messages exposed password resets and two-factor codes
• Chipotle customers are saying their accounts have been hacked
• We found a massive spam operation — and sunk its server
• Dow Jones’ watchlist of 2.4 million high-risk individuals has leaked
• Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’
• Robocaller firm Stratics Networks exposed millions of call recordings
• Massive mortgage and loan data leak gets worse as original documents also exposed

GM Cruise has raised another $1.5 billion in new equity from a group of investors that includes T. Rowe Price Associates, Honda, Softbank Vision Fund and its parent company GM as the self-driving vehicle company pushes to launch a commercial autonomous ride-hailing service this year.

This investment increases Cruise’s post-money valuation to $19 billion, inclusive of SoftBank’s previously announced investment commitment. Cruise has secured capital commitments totaling $7.25 billion in the past year, according to the company.

“Developing and deploying self-driving vehicles at massive scale is the engineering challenge of our generation,” said Cruise CEO Dan Ammann . “Having deep resources to draw on as we pursue our mission is a critical competitive advantage.”

GM Cruise has one of the most aggressive timelines among companies hoping to deploy a commercial self-driving vehicle service. GM’s self-driving unit has stuck to its previously stated timeline to launch a commercial service “sometime in 2019.”

Cruise has grown from a small startup with 40 employees to more than 1,000 today at its San Francisco headquarters.

And Cruise isn’t curtailing that rate of growth; it’s accelerating it.

Cruise announced in November plans to expand to Seattle, in pursuit of more engineering talent to develop its technology. GM Cruise aimed to hire between 100 to 200 engineers by the end of 2019. The company, now led by Ammann, who left his post as president of GM to take the job, plans to hire at least 1,000 more engineers and other personnel by the end of the year. (Kyle Vogt, a Cruise co-founder who was CEO and also unofficially handled the chief technology officer position, is now president and CTO.)

Arden Hoffman, who helped scale Dropbox, left the file-sharing and storage company to head up human resources at Cruise and help the company scale quickly.

The GM subsidiary is expanding its office space in San Francisco to accommodate the growth. GM Cruise will keep its headquarters at 1201 Bryant Street in San Francisco. The company will also take over Dropbox headquarters at 333 Brannan Street some time this year, a move that will triple Cruise’s office space in San Francisco.

GM Cruise received a $2.25 billion investment by SoftBank’s vision fund in May 2018. That first Softbank investment was cut into two parts with the first tranche of $900 million made at the closing of the transaction. Once Cruise’s autonomous vehicles are ready for commercial deployment, Softbank will complete the second investment of $1.35 billion, the companies said at the time.

A few months later, Honda committed $2.75 billion as part of an exclusive agreement with GM and Cruise to develop and produce a new kind of autonomous vehicle.

As part of that agreement, Honda will invest $2 billion into the effort over the next 12 years. At the time, Honda made an immediate and direct equity investment of $750 million into Cruise. Honda’s investment gives the automaker a 5.7 percent stake in Cruise.

Facebook said it’s launching a number of new products aimed at small businesses today — which is appropriate, since we’re currently in the middle of National Small Business Week.

These new features include Automated Ads, which Director of Product Management Nikila Srinivasan said are “really built for small businesses that are one- to two-person businesses with very little marketing expertise.”

The idea is that business owner can answer a few questions about what kind of company they are and about their goals are for the campaign. Then based on their answers — as well as the information on their Facebook Page — Facebook will create recommendations for the audience they should target, the budget they should set and even how the different versions of the ad should look and what they should say.

Small businesses can still buy ads the way they did before, but even if they go the Automated Ads route, they don’t have to accept Facebook’s recommendations. They can set their own budget, for example, and Facebook will predict the results. These ads can run on Facebook itself, as well as Instagram, Messenger and the Facebook Audience Network.

Srinivasan said there’s a “set it and forget it” element to the program, but at the same time Facebook will make sure to keep advertisers alerted to how the campaign is going and “it’s up to the business if they want to come in and be more active.”

“The main thing is, we don’t want there to be guess work, we don’t want there to be expertise needed to use this product,” she said.

And while Facebook said it’s provided lightweight support for booking appointments in Messenger in the past, it’s now expanding that functionality, so businesses can accept appointments and manage all of them appointments through Facebook and Instagram. These appointments can also be synced with the business owner’s personal calendar, or with third-party appointment tools like MyTime and HomeAdvisor.

Lastly, Facebook said it’s rolling out new video editing capabilities, making it easier to add text and image overlays to a video, and to automatically crop a video to accommodate the different aspect ratios of different ad environments.

There’s a new cannabis-infused drink company coming together, helped along by the venture firm DCM, which just plugged $5 million in seed funding into the company.

Called K-Zen Beverages, the months-old startup represents the second cannabis-related investment for DCM after Eaze, the on-demand cannabis delivery platform.

So what’s the appeal? The opportunity to unlock a new market, it seems. Though Bay Area-based K-Zen has yet to roll out its first product — it’s working on three drinks that will be sold as shots and come in lemon chamomile, pink lemonade, and wild berry favors — there aren’t yet throngs of cannabis-infused brands. At least, it remains an open playing field, and the opportunity that K-Zen is chasing looks to be big.

According to one of the boldest predictions so far — unsurprisingly, it’s one that cannabis startups and investors love to cite — the investment bank Canaccord Genuity recently posited by marijuana-infused beverages could hit $600 million in the U.S. by 2022.

Many cannabis-infused beverages, including beer, still lack the psychoactive compound THC because of regulations around it. Companies have instead been infusing their drinks with CBD, a compound that can be derived from both cannabis and hemp plants and that has taken off since industrial hemp cultivation was made legal in the United States last year.

But things are changing quickly. Though pot remains illegal at the federal level, 34 states have now legalized medical or recreational marijuana, and more are expected to join their ranks. That largely explains the timing of a startup like K-Zen — whose name blends ‘kaizen,’ a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, and ‘zen,’ a state of calm originally associated with Zen Buddhism. More to the point, it explains why K-Zen isn’t steering clear of THC but will instead sell one drink that features it exclusively, and sells blends of CBD and THC with the others.

As explains cofounder and co-CEO Judy Yee — a veteran of numerous packaged goods and health and wellness companies — K-Zen is looking to target people like herself, a busy working mother was looking for new ways to “bring joy into an active lifestyle.”

In fact, it was after Yee tried topicals, then some experimental beverages, that she shared how much she liked both with a friend who also follows emerging trends and who Yee had crossed paths with at numerous jobs over the years, As luck would have it, that friend, branding expert Soon Yu, was once funded by DCM. Convinced of this new vision, Yu picked up the phone, shared K-Zen’s vision, and voila, a check was written.

Now, Yee and Yu just have to have the product made — then sell it.

Yee says K-Zen is on target to rollout its beverages this summer, where they will be made available in dispensaries, beginning in California, and directly to consumers via its site.

The five-person startup may have to educate customers first. The reason: marijuana-infused foods typically take at least an hour to kick in, making it harder for consumers to accurately dose themselves.

“People know what a glass of wine does to them, but [we may] create a pictogram that helps people understand if i drink this” what will happen and when, says Yee, acknowledging the challenge.

At least some of its customers may at least tried a cannabis drink by then, given how quickly people are gravitating to new cannabis products. Though K-Zen is early to the game, it is not alone. For example, a Seattle company, Trukino, already makes both THC and CBD varieties of apple cider. Another company, California Dreamin,’ sells TCH-infused sodas that taste like tangerine.