Location tracking vendor Foursquare has purchased location tracking vendor Placed, bulking up its data collection and expanding its online-to-offline advertising attribution capabilities. Seller was Snap, which purchased Placed two years ago. Price was not announced but apparently not much more than the $125 to $135 million that Snap paid.
Then there’s this: Salesforce has decided to not sell its software to retailers who sell certain types of weapons. The move seems to be aimed mostly at making its employees happy, since consumers don’t buy Salesforce products directly.
In somewhat harder news, LiveRamp has launched Authenticated Traffic Solution, which lets Web publishers match visitor data with its IdentityLink profiles. This enables cookieless customer identification across channels. It’s all very noble, according to CEO Scott Howe. “We’re launching our Authenticated Traffic Solution for the good of everyone in the industry—so that permissions can be honored while also democratizing identity and data for the good of all participants.”
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.