Microsoft is about to spend big on Australia, investing US$3.2 billion to expand AI and cloud computing capabilities there 250%. The company also plans to expand its number of data centres from 20 to 29. This comes copywrite lawyers and human rights organizations have been trying to put protections in place around AI use.
Cloud data platform Databricks hasn’t been quite as eager to replace CDPs as Snowflake although it’s surely on their checklist for world domination. They just agreed to spend something over $100 million for Arcion, which copies data from other systems into Databricks The immediate threat is less to CDPs than point solutions such as data pipeline tools – a reminder that platforms like Databricks can effortlessly ruin the market for specialized components: think Godzilla flattening a house outside of Tokyo without even noticing.
Shoppable TV enables viewers to use their connected TV screen to buy products directly off the TV. The pause, browse and buy capability takes advantage of brand integrations of products shown in television shows and allows viewers to buy what they see.
The web search tool Perplexity looks like it’s taking on Google with its latest release, a web browser named Comet. Comet claims to move “from browsing to thinking,” surfacing information and search results in response to natural language queries. Comet is available immediately to Perplexity Max subscribers; others can join a wait list.