We don’t usually report rumors and this item is a couple of days old.  But it’s huge news so I wanted you to see it.  The specific item is that, to avert EU anti-trust action, Alphabet may drop its requirement that YouTube ads be placed through its Ad Manager and Google Ads products.  What makes it huge is the implication that regulators may finally start to take serious action against Big Tech monopolies.

At $4+ billion revenue, Shopify is big but not Big Tech.  But it’s taking a page from the Big Tech playbook with Audiences, which will aggregate customer behaviors from participating merchants to develop target audiences that can then reached through Facebook and LinkedIn.  The new feature will help to overcome the loss in targeting capabilities resulting from Apple’s tighter privacy rules.  

Salesforce’s Dreamforce mega-conference is next week and the company’s publicity elves are already working overtime.  In the first of what are sure to be daily announcements this week, the company announced 100+ industry-specific prompts, data models, and AI capabilities across its fifteen industry clouds.  It also launched an AI Use Case Library to house its industry-specific AI offerings.