And since no day is complete without a little Facebook bashing, here’s an Interbrand report that Facebook is the only BadTech company to lose brand value since last year: Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft all gained (and rank first to fourth, in that order), while Facebook fell from eighth to ninth and lost six percent of its value. Don’t feel too sad for them: they’re still ahead of McDonalds, Intel and IBM.
What’s in a name? Zaius meets the CDP definition of building and sharing a unified, persistent customer database. But they add marketing automation features that place them beyond the CDP realm. They’ve just announced an integration with ecommerce platform Shopify, which suggests they’re serving clients much smaller than most CDP vendors. Speaking of names: they have an endorsement on their Web site from someone named McGregor Button.
Location platform Connecthings has launched Herow, which lets app developers create campaigns based on information about physical sites, precise tracking of mobile device user movements, and local conditions such as weather and traffic. The company also released a survey of mobile users that found their current apps get their location wrong 40% of the time, that 60% want mobile experiences customized to personal desires and location, and 72% don’t want their data shared with third parties.
Customer engagement platform MessageGears will partner with content localization and translation platform Smartling to streamline email translation and localization for 450+ languages. The workflow is automated but actual translations are still done by (machine-assisted) humans.