Few people expect email systems to do identity resolution, thank goodness. But Front is adding many other functions to your inbox, mostly to combine email, texts, direct messages, and other inputs in one location and to support collaboration with (or against) co-workers. They just raised a $59 million Series C, bringing their total to $138 million.
What with all these new privacy regulations, you might think there would be a shortage of data to match against your customer files, Dear Reader. Not so, or at least not yet. We see many announcements promising more matching than a singles cruise. For example, here’s a hookup between mobile marketing platform Vibes and Infutor’s massive store of consumer information.
Fraud and brand safety are also major concerns in the advertising world. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a coalition of giant advertisers and media companies, has announced its plan to address the problem by identifying and avoiding harmful online content. Coalition members control nearly $100 billion in media spend, a significant chunk of the $600 billion or so total. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/24/global-ad-spend-has-slowed-but-2020-looks-set-to-be-a-bumper-year.html
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.