Avoiding a different type of lock-in, Google last week announced that privacy-safe search engine DuckDuckGo won its auction to be offered as an alternative search provider in Android devices across all 31 European markets. The auction was a result of anti-trust action by the European Union. Info.com will also appear in all markets while PrivacyWall, Qwant, Yandex, and GMX split third place.
If your definition of joy is running omni-channel retail on an iPhone, then NewStore is your new best friend. They promise their one system does everything, which may appeal to people who doubt that integrating lots of systems can really be simple. Newstore just raised $20 million in new funding from backers including Salesforce Ventures, bringing their total to $130 million.
Enough about enterprise software. All you Citizen Developers will want to know that Google has just bought AppSheet, a no-code development platform. It can build processes that use data from pretty much any cloud source including Google Sheets, Forms, Maps, and Analytics, as well as non-Google platforms including Salesforce, Dropbox, AWS DynamoDB and MySQL.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.