Stop sulking that no one bought you a Baby Yoda over the holiday. The truly hot gift was a podcast company. Amazon bought itself one last week, spending an estimated $300 million for podcast publisher Wondery. It will help Amazon bulk up its audio streaming business, bringing shivers of non-delight to existing competitors.
Digital customer service platform Khoros just bought Topbox, which collects and analyzes interaction data from calls, chat, social media, surveys, and other sources. The deal was accompanied by a new investment in Khoros by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, which bought control of customer success vendor Gainsight last December. You can see what they’re thinking.
Twitter also has a new podcast-related bauble. They just bought Breaker, which lets podcast listeners comment on episodes, share favorites, and do other things which make the usual Twitter experience such a civilized delight. The Breaker app will soon be discontinued as Breaker staff takes charge of Twitter’s audio-based social networking product, which inexplicably is not named Screech.
It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data. Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions. Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.