And since we’re talking about alliances, let’s note that Dun & Bradstreet announced its company data will now be available to Salesforce.com users via a Lightning Data app on the AppExchange. Users get real time data cleansing and enrichment. To put things in perspective, there are five other Lightning Data integrations including DataFox, HGData, Clearbit, Bombora, and MCH healthcare data.
I’m not sure launching an artificial intelligence-based service counts as news. But Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference kicks off today so I’ll mention that they’ve announced “myEinstein” AI services that let non-developers create predictive models and chatbots. General release is due next summer. I’ll let you decide whether it’s a good idea for thousands (millions?) of Salesforce users to deploy automated systems with little oversight. But I’m certain that Salesforce’s apparent decision to refer to all its users as “Trailblazers” is just plain silly.
Of course, few pieces of research are more fascinating than what your competitors are up to. Market intelligence aggregator Crayon scans the Web for news, marketing campaigns, Web site changes, customer reviews and support requests, and such, and then shares the bits that seem important. They’ve just launched a free tool that gives daily digests of competitors’ marketing efforts.
The U.S. Department of Justice has formally requested the sale of the Chrome browser among other measures following last August’s guilty verdict in its search advertising antitrust suit (not to be confused with last week’s guilty verdict in the adtech antitrust lawsuit). Google is asking for a much narrower focus on deals to be the default search engine for Apple, Mozilla and others. There will be a three-week hearing on the government’s proposals.