Member Spotlight: Loopcycle
Manufacturing businesses often sell their products to customers via third parties or intermediaries. This means there is no direct link between the manufacturer and the end-user. For the manufacturers, this missing link decreases the chances of valuable product recovery for remanufacturing or recycling and makes it harder to foster long-term customer relationships. For the end-users, managing physical assets across multiple sites can lead to losing track of the product inventory. This makes it easier to write off the end-of-life goods [...]
Colorado Joins the State Privacy Patchwork
A little more than three months ago, we wrote about the impending expansion of the state privacy patchwork. At the time, Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) was a signature away from becoming law, with promising efforts also underway in Washington and Oklahoma. Now, with VCDPA officially on the books and many state legislative sessions winding down for the year (the Washington and Oklahoma bills eventually failed to pass), the new privacy landscape is coming into focus, but not before [...]
Our Money’s on Broadband in Infrastructure
The broadband industry faces a problem it’s never really had before: it’s awash in federal taxpayer money. But questions remain as to how recipients should spend that money and what we should do when it runs out in the next few years. In the last COVID-19 response bill in late 2020 and then the stimulus bill (the American Rescue Plan or ARP) from early 2021, Congress authorized hundreds of billions of dollars for states to spend on digital equity and [...]
AppCon’21: Return of the M.A.C. (Mini AppCon)
Every year members of ACT | The App Association make the trip from every corner of the United States to our nation’s capital for three days of education and advocacy. Enter: 2020, COVID-19, and our first totally virtual AppCon! AppCon’20 spanned across five weeks – weeks one through four were issue specific, and week five served as the “catch-all”, as well as media training. For AppCon’21, we remained virtual, kept each week issue specific, and instead of a back-to-back-to-back-to-back-TO-BACK virtual [...]
An Update on the Digital Services Act: SMEs Urge European Commission and Parliament to Ensure Proportionality
The European Parliament's Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) met on 21 June to discuss the proposed regulation of online platforms and digital service providers, the Digital Services Act (DSA). ACT | The App Association has concerns that some of the provisions Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and the IMCO rapporteur Christel Schaldemose makes in the draft report could compromise small and medium (SMEs) and micro enterprises’ ability to grow and compete in the European Digital Single [...]
App Makers Tour of Europe – Germany
On 17 June 2021, ACT | The App Association continued the App Makers Tour of Europe. During our second stop in Germany, local app developers, policymakers, and industry representatives discussed the German app economy and the opportunities and challenges developers face today. Our panel also debated the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and how it could affect app developers and the broader tech ecosystem. After some opening remarks and a warm welcome from the App Association’s founder and chairperson Mike Sax, [...]