One big use for location data is targeted outdoor advertising. Which finally lets me mention this month-old news that start-up Firefly has raised $21.5 million for “remotely programmable geotargeted ads” on the roof of rideshare cars. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we wrote about last summer about Grabb-it, which puts geotargeted ads in car windows.
You were somewhat interested in last week’s news that Akamai had purchased identity access management vendor Janrain, Dear Reader. So maybe you’d like to know that Janrain competitor OneLogin has raised a nice round $100 million. Now you do.
Further afield: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has spent $103 million to acquire Berlin-based open source data tech vendor Data Artisans. It’s interesting on several levels: Alibaba doing a deal in Europe; Alibaba competing with Amazon in cloud services; and another big deal for open source tech. Plenty for all you sheep to chew on.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.