I’m not sure whether this is good news or bad: a federal appellate court has reaffirmed its ruling that data scraping from public profiles on LinkedIn is legal. Privacy advocates and data owners might be unhappy, but researchers and archivists are now on firmer legal ground. The decision follows a Supreme Court ruling that limited the protections of anti-hacking laws.
Just in case you haven’t seen enough bad news recently, spam is getting worse, too. This summary from Axios reports that spam email rose 30% from 2020 to 2021, spam phone calls hit a six month high in March, and spam texts nearly doubled since last June. Sorry.
This one is good news for sales managers, although phone agents might disagree. Zoom has released an AI tool that analyzes sales conversations to extract useful, structured information and create metrics such as how often salespeople ask engaging questions and provide next steps, and how long they talk. The feature, Zoom IQ for Sales, can also pull in data from Salesforce to give a more complete view of on-going client conversations.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.