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.

GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads.  The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles.  GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.