Lots of fun product news today. First we have the official launch of conDati, which assembles marketing data from multiple sources and uses it for reports, visualization, and forecasting. conDati ingests data from advertising, Web analytics, email, social, and marketing automation systems but seems to work at the level of campaigns, not individual customers. They raised a $4.7 million Series A earlier this month.

Here’s a little reminder of what could go wrong: a Portland woman found her Alexa device had sent a recording of her private conversation to an email contact without permission. (Portlandia fans will be especially amused.) Amazon found the device was functioning properly but misunderstood background noises as instructions. Related: researchers have found they can embed undetectable smart device voice commands within recorded songs. Remind me again why we need these devices?

The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.