Taboola is intercepting users before they visit any web site by placing a news feed on home screens on Samsung, Xioami, Oppo, and other smartphones.  The links will go to a web page that features advertising and then send users to the original news sources, which will be Taboola-curated reliable news sources.   This entirely avoids the challenge of moderating user-sourced content that plagues social media.

Martech spending in the U.S. will exceed $20 billion in 2022, according to this eMarketer forecast. Wow, that’s impressive…oh wait, it’s a tiny fraction of the $344 billion global martech spend estimated by other sources, based largely on Gartner’s well-known estimate that martech is about one-quarter of all marketing spend. Further perspective:  Salesforce alone had $26 billion in revenue last year, although not all of that would count as martech.

Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents.  You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better.  It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange.  Price was not announced.