IBM will make Pitney Bowes’ location intelligence solutions available on its “BlueMix” platform-as-a-service development environment. This will make it easier for developers to embed Pitney Bowes’ location information and services in their own mobile products.
BloomReach, a machine learning-based e-commerce recommendation platform, announced it has purchased Hippo, a personalized Web content management system. Clearly they complement each other. But in a world where everything is supposed to plug into everything else via APIs, it’s interesting to see what looks suspiciously like old-school product integration. Are they telling us that API integrations aren’t quite as smooth as promised?
The Weather Company launched Watson Ads today, the first-ever consumer use of IBM Watson technology for advertising purposes. Watson Ads let consumers interact with a brand via IBM Watson, by allowing them to ask questions via voice or text and receive highly personalized information about the brand’s advertised product or offering.
In a follow-up to their January report, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority raised the number of concerns they have with Privacy Sandbox to 79. Among other issues, they adopted the privacy concerns raised by another U.K. regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office. Google’s recent decision to shift third-party cookie deprecation to next year might mean they saw this coming.