CDP Institute

Next up, retail-oriented CDP vendor Manthan has added a new product recommendation engine. It works at the individual level and supports use cases including cross-sell. Churn reduction, and preferred channel identification.

Also in retail, data-as-a-service vendor Robling has launched a new cloud-based analytics platform. The vendor-managed system assembles data from all sources using prebuilt APIs and connectors, puts it in an enterprise data model, and creates a large collection of predefined metrics. Robling uses the Snowflake data warehouse engine, which makes the data available to third party tools such as Tableau, Qlik, and Looker.

Retail marketing platform Ometria has raised a $21 Series B for AI-powered personalization. TechCrunch thinks Ometria is the only marketing system that’s built specifically for retail and creates unified customer profiles. It’s not.

Daisy Intelligence doesn’t claim to be the only AI-powered system to deliver automated recommendations to retailers, in its case for optimizing product and pricing decisions. But, hey, they’re Canadian. It did just raise a $10 million (Canadian) Series A.

Luminoso uses AI to convert unstructured text data such as surveys and product reviews into business insights. They don’t have a funding announcement today but did just release Daylight Express, a low-cost, quick-deployment system that draws on the company’s past experience to deploy new clients without extensive custom training of the AI.

What the heck, let’s just go full tin-foil-hat today. We’ll start with news that Facebook has suspended “tens of thousands” of apps during its on-going privacy review, although the company rushes to reassure everyone that only (?) 400 developers were involved and not all suspensions reflected actual privacy violations. The New York Times cites a Massachusetts court case for the figure of 69,000 actual suspensions. Facebook doesn’t claim these numbers are complete.

On the bright side, a developer named Canopy has released a privacy-safe news reader named Tonic. The system offers a personalized experience without letting interaction and behavioral data leave the user’s devices. The trick is “differential privacy”, which means sharing interest profiles that apply to groups rather than specific individuals. Whatever the merits of Canopy’s approach, the story here is that companies are trying to solve the problem.

It’s not exactly privacy but our third item is a strategic alliance on brand safety between Nielsen and OpenSlate. OpenSlate scores more than 600 million ad-supported videos for content, quality and brand suitability. It’s another example of Internet safety issues becoming mainstream concerns that attract mainstream solutions.

WordPress.com parent Automattic has raised a $300 million Series D with Salesforce Ventures as the sole investor. It’s a vote in favor of open source, freemium, and, according to the company, in “the future of work”. Raise you hand if you doubted that work had a future.

The future of publishing, on the other hand, is far from clear. But Ziff Davis has made the transition to digital media services. Its B2B arm just bought tech buyer community Spiceworks, which offers all sorts of ways to connect buyers with sellers.

It may seem that Twitter’s core business is irresponsibly spreading fake news, but the company says “Twitter becoming more Twittery” really means being “conversational and fun”. Somehow this translates into spending on out of home media and experiences, according to DigiDay. So the real world seems to have a future as well.

I can’t find any reason to mention that today’s date of 9-19-19 is a palindrome, so I guess I won’t.  I will note the news is all about self-service, starting with a new machine learning function in Tealium’s AudienceStream CDP. The new feature natively reads data gathered by AudienceStream, creates predictive models, and shares the resulting model scores through Tealium’s integrations.  All without anyone writing a single line of code.