I’m sure there’s a reason that Tel Aviv-based Web analytics start-up Oribi named itself after a small African antelope, although it might simply be an excuse to make hoodies with horns. Their fashion sense extends to their product positioning, which adds trendy no-code bling to Web analytics. The company just raised a $15.5 million Series B, bringing total funding to $27.9 million.
It might be a sin to enjoy seeing Facebook attacked from all sides, but it’s worth it. Having lost the battle against arbitration on news content payments to Australian publishers, the company now faces a joint push from Microsoft and major European publishers for similar rules.Meanwhile, a bipartisan coalition of U.S. legislators has proposed letting small publishers jointly negotiate news content payments without facing antitrust penalties.
As adtech vendors scramble for cookie substitutes, it’s easy to confuse ID systems used for targeting and systems for attribution. The big difference is that targeting systems need to identify as many people as possible while attribution systems can use a sample. Nielsen’s ID resolution system, announced last November, is aimed squarely at attribution: it uses first party data such as email addresses and device IDs to build a comprehensive picture of behaviors for a limited set of people and then validates the results against Nielsen panel data. They just... Read More >
If robots wrote the news, would they write about other robots? I ask because there’s been a suspicious burst of items about AI-powered writing tools, just when live journalists might have set things on autopilot so they could sneak out early for the holiday. Top of the list: writing-suggestion platform Grammarly just raised $200 million at a $13 billion valuation, doubling total funding to $400 million.