There’s a growing trend to doing commerce within social media and messaging. FastForward.ai is on it, with a platform that enables mobile operators and enterprises to create digital engagement, commerce and payments inside social and messaging apps. They just announced that an $8 million seed round of funding.
Today’s theme is “odd couples”. First up: contact center software vendor Serenova is merging with video conferencing vendor Lifesize. The connection may seem tenuous but remember that Serenova was purchased in 2016 by Marlin Equity Partners, which then backed Serenova’s acquisition of Telstrat call analytics in 2017 and ProScheduler workforce scheduling in 2019. The stated goal is a “holistic unified communications portfolio”
Europe’s base of home-grown Customer Data Platform vendors grew rapidly in 2019, according to the CDP Industry in Europe 2020 report from the Customer Data Platform Institute. The number of vendors grew by 73% and employment grew by 80% during the year. Estimated revenue for Europe-based firms reached €260 million.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.