Stream processing – which treats data as a continuous stream of events – is increasingly important to marketers and CDPs. Confluent, whose founders created the open source Apache Kafka streaming data engine, just raised a $125 million Series D, bringing their total to $206 million. It’s yet another example of open source technology in the marketing stack.

One advantage that voice devices have over phones is fewer ads, although that is likely to change. At the moment, mobile ads can be both annoying and security risks. Geoedge, helps publishers block problematic Internet ads, has added similar protection for in-app ads. It’s hard to imagine Amazon or Google allowing Geoedge to interfere with voice device ads but who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Salesforce has announced a new solution, Unified Knowledge, that will pull data from third-party systems thus supplementing Salesforce Data Cloud with external information sources. Initially, this is mainly aimed at helping Service Cloud users in combination with Einstein for Service’s generative AI. It was developed through a strategic partnership with AI vendor Zoomin.