We were so focused on Privacy Day yesterday that I had to defer telling you that Episerver is renaming itself Optimizely, a company it purchased last fall. Neither name exactly screams “world’s best digital experience platform” but Optimizely was apparently the stronger brand. It was certainly more popular on Google Trends.
Apple celebrated Privacy Day by announcing an “early spring” date to enforce its new rule that each app must request explicit opt-in to share users’ data with third parties. The strong expectation is that many won’t say yes and the flow of data to personalize ads and track results will be reduced to a trickle.
This isn’t quite a privacy item, but identity management is closely related. On that front, Master Data Management vendor and borderline CDP Reltio has launched a free cloud-based identity resolution service. Users can upload lists of names which the system will clean, store, and compare with previously-loaded names to flag potential matches for manual review. The system will remember past matches so each user builds an expanded identity graph over time.
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.