The European Union has announced a formal investigation into TikTok over allegations that it has breached obligations to protect minors. Specific problems cited by an E.U. official include “addictive design and screen time limits, rabbit hole effect, age verification, default privacy settings.” TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, could be fined up to 6% of its global turnover if found in breach of the Digital Services Act.
Walmart has agreed to acquire VIZIO and its SmartCast Operating System for approximately $2.3 billion. The acquisition should accelerate Walmart’s media business, Walmart Connect, allowing it access to VIZIO’s CTV advertising solutions. VIZIO’s device eco-system featuring the SmartCast OS boasts 18 million accounts, a growth of around 400% since 2018.
Meltwater, a provider of media, social and consumer intelligence, announced it is partnering with Microsoft on an integrated communications insights solution. The partnership will integrate the data from Meltwater’s listening tools with Microsoft’s AI-driven capability to deliver data “as dialogue.” Microsoft will use Meltwater as its provider of global intelligence, while Meltwater has made a multi-year commitment to Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform.
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.)