ThoughtSpot took a survey of data analysts, who rather glumly reported they spend too much time creating low-value reports and not enough on strategic business initiatives. They’d love to see more data-literate, AI-assisted business users who could answer their own damn questions.
NIST issues challenge with cash prizes to protect public safety PII The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched the Differential Privacy Temporal Map Challenge drawing on crowd sourcing to find new ways to protect data from public safety datasets (gathered to issue weather warnings, food recalls, or manage other emergency health needs).
Martech financing in general has picked up since the first half of the year, according to LUMA Partner’s third quarter report. Deals are still lower than year except in the red-hot Direct-to-Consumer sector. Their recap of martech acquisitions includes the $35 million purchase of self-proclaimed CDP Retention Science by Web hosting company Endurance International group in July, which had slipped under our radar.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)