Security improvements (and possibly tacos) are also on the menu at omnichannel marketing platform ActiveCampaign, which just purchased DMARC Digests, an email authentication and monitoring service. ActiveCampaign also bought transactional email service Postmark. The deals have little in common beyond expanding the scope of ActiveCampaign’s offerings.
Yesterday was both Cinco de Mayo and World Password Day, which probably means a lot of passwords are now set to Taco. Microsoft, Apple, and Google marked the day ironically, by announcing joint plans to support the password-free sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and World Wide Web Consortium. Security experts have come to regard passwords as inherently insecure, preferring hardware- or biometric-based alternatives.
The folks at agency holding company Publicis Groupe no doubt care about security, but their latest acquisition is ecommerce analytics software company Profitero. It’s unusual for an ad agency to own straight-up commercial software, but Publicis must have decided that Profitero’s predictive analytics for product, content, search, pricing, and other decisions is worth the reported €200 million ($210 million) price.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.