Life has many mysteries, and the impact of TV advertising ranks high among them. TVSquared shines a light into this dark corner by correlating ad broadcasts with customer response through phone, apps, mobile, Web, and SMS. They just raised $8 million, bringing total funding to $21 million.

The unifying thread in all this is the value of personal data. Research Intelligencer did some fascinating (to me) research that found most people would consider a rate below minimum wage to be fair pay for time spent viewing ads. The article links to another study that found advertisers actually pay under $3 per hour of consumer time. Equally fascinating (or not).

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.