There’s already been plenty of comment on Facebook’s plan to refocus the news feed on personal messages. My take is it’s a clever defensive move to relinquish power over public opinion before national governments grab the company to secure that power for themselves. After all, being nationalized is bad for business and Facebook’s only real purpose is to make money. As it should be.

Most of the news from NRF seemed to be about in-store systems – not especially surprising, but where were artificial intelligence or unified online/offline experience? Instead we have point of sale marketing specialist Ecrebo announcing a new platform to deliver targeted offers at checkout via printed receipts, digital receipts, or customer-facing screens. Ecrebo bases its targeting on a central database that combines transactions and other data from all channels, so it does look a bit like a CDP. Not that I’m obsessed.

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)