Data analysis platform Looker has announced special applications for digital marketing and Web analytics. The applications, now in public beta, provide prebuilt data structures and analytics. Looker combines data from multiple sources and makes it available for analysis and visualization. But it stores the data in a SQL database, making it more limited than most Customer Data Platforms.

An uncool name wasn’t the main reason so few people used Google’s social media network Google+ although it probably didn’t help. The company today announced they were shutting down the consumer portion of Google+, although they’ll keep some corporate applications. They also described several new limits on data sharing, mentioned that a security bug exposed data from at least a half million accounts, and look, a squirrel!

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)