Facebook cares mostly about selling your data, but they’ll take your money directly too. They’re testing a new QR code payment feature to make it easier to use their Facebook Pay money transfer service. Talk about strategic fit: trust is essential for financial services providers and who doesn’t trust Facebook?
And for the triopoly trifecta: Amazon’s share of the U.S. digital ad market grew to 10.3% in 2020, up from 7.8% the year before, says eMarketer. The company took business from Google, whose share dropped to 26.6% from 28.9%. Facebook’s share also grew, from 23.6% to 25.2%. Everyone else’s slide of the got a bit smaller, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Customer identity data company LiveRamp announced an API integration on the Google Cloud Marketplace. This means Google Cloud users will be able to access LiveRamp’s identity services and data without custom development. LiveRamp says the move enhances consumer privacy since companies don’t have to send their data to partners for processing. Our privacy advocate friends are unconvinced.
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.