The CDP industry grew at a record pace during the first half of 2021, adding 20 new vendors, 1,200 employees and $550 million in funding, according to the CDP Institute’s latest industry update report. It also saw a record number of acquisitions, as customer engagement vendors bought CDPs to glue together disjointed channel systems. Download for details.
China is continuing its crackdown on the country’s big tech by launching a national campaign that will address what it perceives as major issues in the digital industry. The country is also introducing guidelines for online platforms to ensure food delivery riders earn above the country’s minimum wage, are freed from unreasonable demands placed upon them by algorithms and have access to social security and a place in a union.
Google Cloud has released Retail Search, a managed service that provides on-site search functions for retail websites. Google says it will do a better job than other search functions of understanding customer intent and returning appropriate product suggestions. It’s part of Google’s Product Discovery Solutions for Retail suite.
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.