Indoor mapping is one of the most intriguing location-related applications. Mappedin helps retailers build maps of their locations and use them to create “digital wayfinding experiences” on mobile apps. They’ve just announced an integration to make their applications available on Apple mobile devices and, not-so-incidentally, provide property owners with data on user behaviors.
Amperity, which has been in not-very-quiet stealth mode for over a year, has formally unveiled its “intelligent customer data platform”. As you’d expect, it builds unified customer databases using machine learning and a large-scale distributed data architecture on Microsoft Azure. The big innovation appears to be probabilistic rating of the matches found by its identity resolution engine, so customers take use tighter or looser standards depending on how important it is in a particular situation to be certain that matches are correct. The company raised $9 million in February 2016.
This isn’t exactly news but it’s still interesting to learn that Amazon’s patent on “1-click” ordering expires today. Does it seem they’ve been doing that forever or that they started just yesterday? Bonus question: what will change now that everyone can offer 1-click shopping?
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.