E-commerce gets all the attention right now but plenty of small businesses like landscapers and veterinarians still have to deliver their services in person. Many prefer all-in-one solutions that minimize their technology burden. GoSite offers one of those, combining Web sites, directory listing, messaging, appointments, payments, and review management. They just raised a $40 million Series B, bringing their total to $56 million.
It’s easy to think of Cisco as an infrastructure company but their products also include Webex and contact center systems, so they are definitely in the customer experience and collaboration industries too. Reinforcing the point: they just paid $730 million for IMImobile, which offers a cross-channel customer interaction management suite. In other words, they live closer to Salesforce, Pega, and Twilio than you might have realized.
What’s that, you thought identity data was the new oil? That means cookie replacements are like wind power. The latest blast of hot air comes from Verizon Media, in the form of a unified solution called ConnectID. It can serve ads based on 900 million consumer relationships across 30+ Verizon Media brands including Yahoo!, HuffPost, AOL, and TechCrunch. It’s a closed universe, but a big one.
There’s no shortage of lawsuits by publishers against genAI platforms for copyright infringement; now major studios are getting with the program. Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal are accusing Midjourney of using some of their best known characters (think Darth Vader and the Minions) in its AI image generator — a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” they say. No response yet from Midjourney.