AI-generated content vendor Jasper just announced a $125 million Series A, which brings its total funding to, um, $125 million. They somehow accrued 70,000 paying customers on their own. They also just launched a browser extension that can make suggestions about pretty much any website text, and text-to-image functionality.
Marketing agencies owning their own technology goes in and out of style. Today it’s on the upswing and digital marketing agency WebFX has joined the party by acquiring Nutshell, a B2B SMB CRM and email platform. Nutshell will supplement the company’s existing platforms, including a reporting service that it calls a CDP.
It’s charming that the industry term for Wireless Internet Service Providers is WISPs. If you already knew that, you probably know that Calix offers systems to support that industry and other types of broadband providers. They just launched Marketing Cloud Plus, which lets providers enhance real-time customer data with demographic, psychographic, and geographic data. It’s CDP-ish, so we can call it another example of an industry-specific CDP.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.