If trust levels do improve, one reason might be that governments are seen as doing a better job of protecting their citizens. News that the French National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) fined Google $57 million for GDPR violations could be a step in the right direction. While $57 million is about three hours’ worth of revenue for Google, what matters is the potential for much higher fines in the future.
Stream processing – which treats data as a continuous stream of events – is increasingly important to marketers and CDPs. Confluent, whose founders created the open source Apache Kafka streaming data engine, just raised a $125 million Series D, bringing their total to $206 million. It’s yet another example of open source technology in the marketing stack.
One advantage that voice devices have over phones is fewer ads, although that is likely to change. At the moment, mobile ads can be both annoying and security risks. Geoedge, helps publishers block problematic Internet ads, has added similar protection for in-app ads. It’s hard to imagine Amazon or Google allowing Geoedge to interfere with voice device ads but who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Netherlands-based retention management platform Retail Rocket just raised a $24 Million Series A, and immediately spent some of it to buy Sailplay, a New York-based marketing automation vendor that will grow its U.S. presence. Retail Rocket builds unified customer profiles in a module it charmingly calls Data Warehouse, and has other modules for AI-driven personalization, segmentation, and campaign management. The company has more than 1,000 global clients across Europe and South America.