Are you less concerned with cross-channel identities than location-based targeting? Near, which provides real-time location information gathered from over a billion devices, has integrated its data with the Oracle BlueKai Marketplace.
Sprinklr is a social media management platform, but a year ago it purchased Booshaka, which had technology to connect customer data across multiple sources. The resulting love child is just-released Sprinklr Audience, which collects data from mobile, social, email, commerce, CRM and Web systems, integrates it, and creates audience segments that can be pushed to social advertising (and presumably other) channels. It’s as if there’s a little Customer Data Platform inside, crying to get out.
MarketsandMarkets has a new report predicting that emotion detection and recognition technologies will grow nearly 40% per year, to reach $36 billion by 2021. Scope includes facial expressions, speech, voice, and bio-sensing (ECG, eye tracking, wearable, etc.). This is a major new data source for marketers and their CDP systems, not to mention AI systems in general.
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.