We seem to have a “customer behavior” theme this week. I don’t know why but let’s go with it. A study from marketing services consultancy Lavidge finds that tech buyers rely most on colleagues and friends, search engines, and vendor Web sites as data sources during product discovery, while paying less attention to case studies, industry reports, blogs, and advertising in general. No prizes for guessing that cold call telemarketing is the least favorite of all.

Companies position themselves to investors as well as buyers. Business software discovery portal Crozdesk found the hottest funding categories are now financial technology (yes, “fintech”) and analytics, including AI and Big Data. Funding dropped for former leaders including advertising, sales, and marketing (one category) and CRM. Also hot: integration as a service that lets “citizen integrators” to connect systems for themselves and products for specific industries (vertical solutions) rather than generic (horitzontal) solutions. Quite intriguing if you’re into this sort of thing.

Enterprise AI vendor Uniphore has acquired CDP ActionIQ and cloud data engineering system Infoworks.  The combination of products will create a Zero Data AI Cloud that simplifies AI deployments by enabling companies to access data for AI projects without moving it from existing systems.  Prices were not announced.