We have no real news today so let’s just amuse ourselves with tech. We’ll start with a “second-generation support chatbot” from Intercom, which answers questions as soon as users start typing. You might find that rude but the vendor says it shows the system truly understands customers’ problems. Feel better?

No one worries more about the loss of cookies than DMP vendors, whose business was built on them. Piano, which sells a DMP along with other audience management technologies, is trying to combine its first-party DMP with “zero party data”, the industry term for information that consumers provide voluntarily. The resulting platform, Piano Zero, offers features to collect that data and use it for segmentation and ad targeting.

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)