Just in case you had doubts that Google is serious about competing with Amazon in retail, consider this: Google just invested $550 million in Chinese e-commerce merchant JD.com. Google doesn’t do much business in China so this is about expanding in other markets and listing JD.com as a seller in Google Shopping. Google also announced several enhancements last week that help retailers display their inventory on-line and drive traffic to local stores. See this from The Street for more thoughts on the JD.com deal.

“When we do right, nobody remembers. When we do wrong, nobody forgets.” It’s the motto of Hell’s Angels but Facebook might agree. So let’s give them (Facebook) a little credit for requiring marketers to certify consent for custom audiences they upload to Facebook. But not too much credit: Facebook isn’t verifying that the certifications are valid.

Customer engagement platform Twilio has integrated with OpenAI’s Realtime API to enable Twilio customers and developers to build AI-powered conversational apps. The integration will support the creation of speech-to-speech voice conversations featuring AI agents. This is an expansion of existing Twilio/OpenAI integrations.