Messaging company Airship has acquired ReplyBuy, which enables two-way conversations and payments over SMS. Airship plans to add commerce capabilities to all its channels. Perhaps you’ve heard that ecommerce has grown rapidly this year.
I’ve been kind of hoping that a citizen newsletter editor would take over some of my work here, but so far, no luck. Citizen developers are getting more support from Google, which has just released an Airtable-like system named, um, Tables. It lets non-programmers define processes, share data, and do other stuff that used to require a highly trained professional.
Forrester analysts have also been hard at work, with a Google-sponsored study finding that better use of data and analytics is a top-5 priority for 63% of marketers and siloes are the top data challenge (57%). Fewer than half (42%) have a cross-platform view of Web and app analytics, which might seem like a little or a lot. But 84% consider cross-platform analytics critical or very important, so let’s call that glass half empty.
Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley. They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.