Bulk text messaging platform Community has raised $40 million from Salesforce Ventures, bringing total funding to $90 million. Community enables celebrities and organizations to send messages to people who sign up for them. What makes this special, I do not know.
Microsoft announced a deal to buy speech recognition expert Nuance for $19.7 billion, an impressive 13x revenue and 23% above the closing stock price on Friday. Microsoft described the deal in terms of expanding its position in the healthcare industry, where Nuance is especially strong. Marketers will note there are plenty of other applications for what Nuance does.
At least 40% of consumers allowed iPhone apps to track them when presented with Apple’s new opt-in message, according to this AppsFlyer study of 13 million choices. AppsFlyer notes that most observers expected a much higher opt-out rate, but the results really shouldn’t surprise you: most studies show that about one-third of consumers never want to share data, one-third share it freely, and one-third are somewhere in the middle. See this one, for example.
GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads. The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles. GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.