CDP Institute

McDonald’s is buying Apprente, a conversational AI company specializing in “complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering”. Clearly McDonald’s is taking tech seriously: the deal follows its purchase of Dynamic Yield in July. The company is also setting up “McD Tech Labs” to work on additional technologies.

Facebook is taking an uncharacteristically proactive step on privacy, announcing it will honor Android and iOS privacy settings when they are more restrictive than a user’s Facebook privacy settings. It’s easy to speculate that the real goal is avoiding repeated reminders to users for how much data is being collected. But let’s instead see it as evidence that privacy concerns are having a positive impact on business behavior.

Adobe has announced Customer Journey Analytics and Cross-Device Analytics within Adobe Analytics. The former shows data from multiple sources; the latter shows data from related devices. Both can combine data in Adobe Analytics with data and device graphs in the (separate) Adobe Experience Platform. Release dates were not mentioned.

Meanwhile, small business CRM Insightly has released a marketing automation module, complete with multi-step journeys, email templates, and advanced analytics. Insightly has more than 25,000 customers worldwide. The marketing module should be available by the time you read this.

Finally, AI-based scheduling software x.ai is making its system available for free, so long as you share your calendar, location, and contacts. X.ai describes itself as an example of a “utilitarian social network” that provides specific shared services. They point to Venmo, DocuSign, and DropBox as other examples. Interesting.

E-commerce tech giant Shopify has dropped a cool $450 million for 6 River Systems, which provides warehouse fulfillment systems. The acquisition will support Shopify Fulfillment Network, which was launched in June to help sellers compete with Amazon’s fulfillment juggernaut. Yes, I said juggernaut.

Maybe Shopify’s foray into the physical world is the start of a trend. PFL, which integrates marketing automation with direct mail production, is crossing the same bridge. They just published a report that finds direct mail is an effective but underutilized supplement to digital channels.

Since we’re dancing on the frontier between digital and physical, let’s finish with a bow to Syte, which just raised a $21.5 million Series B for its visual recognition AI. Syte lets shoppers take a picture of a product and search for similar products on an ecommerce Web site. It also has in-store applications such as smart mirrors and in-store stylists. They get bonus points for a company name that puns on both Web site and eye sight.

Privacy issues are creeping up on you like the demented clown in a horror movie, Dear Reader. BigID stands ready to rescue you with tools to find and monitor all the personal information hidden in your virtual cupboards. They just raised a $50 million Series C, bringing total funding to $96 million.

Finding a privacy-safe way to share visitor data without cookies is another nightmare in search of a happy ending. Industry group IAB Tech Lab has proposed replacing cookies with a shared token that acts as a universal identifier, stores privacy preferences, and is backed by measures to ensure those preferences are honored. They hope the standard can be managed by industry groups with government support.

What’s that, you worry that centralized data accumulation can lead to massive leaks people who ignore consent? But surely anyone working with so much sensitive data would never do anything really dumb, like leaving 419 million phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts on an insecure server. Oh wait: Facebook just did.

Looking for some ammunition in your fight for a data quality program? Bad data costs marketers 21 cents of every media dollar, according to this Forrester study for Marketing Evolution. Quality leaders performed better on every imaginable business metric.