WordPress.com parent Automattic has raised a $300 million Series D with Salesforce Ventures as the sole investor. It’s a vote in favor of open source, freemium, and, according to the company, in “the future of work”. Raise you hand if you doubted that work had a future.
What the heck, let’s just go full tin-foil-hat today. We’ll start with news that Facebook has suspended “tens of thousands” of apps during its on-going privacy review, although the company rushes to reassure everyone that only (?) 400 developers were involved and not all suspensions reflected actual privacy violations. The New York Times cites a Massachusetts court case for the figure of 69,000 actual suspensions. Facebook doesn’t claim these numbers are complete.
AdRoll is applying machine learning to ad targeting for direct-to-consumer brands. Its new Brand Awareness Solution lets users combine their company’s own data with AdRoll’s second and third party data, using machine learning to target the best prospects via contextual, demographic, interest, look-alike, retargeting, or email campaigns.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.