After much breathless press speculation, Google announced incremental changes in how cookies are handled in its Chrome browser. Some data sharing will be blocked and users will gain more fine-grained control over how they are tracked. It was more roadmap than roadblock but still a step forward.
Open source Web site vendor Acquia has purchased Mautic, an open source marketing automation platform. The company says the merger will create the first-ever “open marketing cloud”, something you might not have known you wanted. Mautic, launched in 2014, claims over 250,000 users.
Bonobo is a conversational AI start-up that extracts customer insights from email, chat, video, and other interactions. No one has claimed they’re a CDP. But they did just get bought by Salesforce in a deal that one source valued at $50 million for the 20 person company.
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.