Google announced a deal to buy business analytics software vendor Looker for $2.6 billion. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Google’s existing cloud database products by letting users create shared business metrics and develop applications. Looker will continue to run on all cloud database platforms.

Nothing is murkier than influencer marketing. Klear, an influencer marketing platform, says it can fix this with a newly-announced feature to estimate campaign ROI by calculating Earned Media Value – that is, the how much it would cost to buy the same amount of coverage in paid media (a.k.a. advertising). Not everyone agrees that EMV is a valid approach.

Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.