Gravity4 calls itself “the world’s first A.I. big data marketing cloud”, which sounds suspiciously fluffy but is backed by some substance. They focus mostly on programmatic advertising but have “apps” that support other channels. Latest news is they’ve released a blockchain-based service for paid digital advertising. Bonus trivia: the product is called “Lydian” in honor of Lydia, the first civilization to use coins (not Lydia, the tattooed lady).

If anything is more credible than academic acceptance, it’s funding. So that AI-driven analytics vendor ThoughtSpot has raised more than $160 million speaks for itself. ThoughtSpot just announced SpotIQ, which automatically queries enterprise data sources and returns “deep and relevant insights for users that they may not have thought to look for on their own”. The company says that “SpotIQ accomplishes in a single click what could take 40,000 man hours.” It doesn’t say which men, doing what, or how long it would take a team of women.

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.