Speaking of investments, here’s a $10 million Series C for Anagog, a privacy-friendly location tracking app. Sounds like an oxymoron but Anagog keeps all the detailed information it gathers on the phone itself, building a profile and creating behavior predictions that can trigger brand messages. The system does allow personal data to be shared but only with “explicit user consent”.
If you’re really hungry for coronavirus news, the Customer Experience Matrix blog published a long review http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2020/04/companies-scramble-to-study-covid-19.html of recent research findings yesterday. But let’s move on to happier topics, starting with improved bi-directional integrations between Salesforce, mParticle, and mobile marketing platform Airship. Airship also launched a new cross-channel journey manager. The interface is less revolutionary than they seem to think, but it does look better than most.
Marketers’ famous herd instinct is synchronizing their response to coronavirus. First came a rash of announcements offering remote conferencing and collaboration systems, then a slew of chatbots answering coronavirus questions. This week’s trend is studies on coronavirus’ impact on consumer behavior, including increased online sales of groceries, fitness equipment and computers; more video streaming; distrust in government (especially in the U.S.); and expectation that employers will act responsibly. Click for studies from Adobe, Amperity, Edelman, First Insight, Kantar, Placer.ai, Toluna, Upfluence, Yotpo, and Yotta.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.