Customer success technology vendor Totango announced a $9 million Series D funding, bringing its total to $36.3 million. Systems like Totango connect data from all sources to build a complete customer view, but they’re not CDPs unless they also expose the raw details to other systems.
You knew this was coming: location data is now so easily available that someone is giving it away. Location analytics vendor Placed is giving free access to visitor traffic data for 1,900 major businesses, including giant chains such as Walmart, McDonalds, and Starbucks. They hope to spur demand by educating the market.
Perhaps more hopeful for local media: start-up Relevnt is expanding its “location-based mobile network”, which lets local publishers and organizations host interest-based communities which are exposed via mobile app to subscribers. Contributors’ content appears within immediately via RSS feeds and contributors earn advertising revenue. Technically, each community is a Web domain owned by the local publisher and the communities are aggregated by the mobile app. So far, the only way to get the app is through the Apple Store so this isn’t entirely free-range content grazing.
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.