News - CDP Institute - Page 10

Salesforce announced the launch of Salesforce Starter for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) businesses in India. Starter is an easy-to-use CRM that includes sales, service, and email outreach tools in one suite, helping companies get started – so they have the tools to improve customer experiences, reduce costs, and drive revenue.

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Center3 by stc, a regional data center and data services provider, has announced a strategic collaboration with Oracle to provide hosting and data services for the planned Oracle Cloud Riyadh Region as well as support the expansion of the existing Oracle Cloud Jeddah Region. This will help accelerate the rollout of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services to support the increasing cloud computing demands of private and public sector organizations in Saudi Arabia.

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Mitgo has launched ‘Takeads’, a privacy-first and cookieless platform to bring a user-centric approach to native advertising in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The mar-tech (marketing technology) company started to work on its native advertising offering five years ago. Takeads’ delivers targeted advertisements without utilising the users’ personal or behavioural tracking data. Instead of user data, its analytical algorithm runs on content analysis.

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Gig workers, including Uber drivers and those who work for food delivery services would be granted rights to negotiate employment rights, including minimum base pay, hours, and insurance if a law introduced by Australia’s center-left Labor government goes into effect. This is an issue being considered by many countries, and in the EU, which is working on draft rules.

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Launched in 2016, Desygner has a base of 32 million users worldwide. It is growing rapidly with a million new users a month and has also attracted major corporations, including Oracle, Microsoft, and Shutterstock. Now, the self-funded company is prepared to go after Melbourne-based and heavily funded Canva, which is estimated to be worth AU$39 billion (US$26.5 billion).

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Venture capital firm 500 Global announced the successful close of $143 million across its largest Southeast Asian early-stage fund to date, 500 Southeast Asia III, L.P. (500 SEA III), and its growth investment vehicle for Southeast Asia. The new early-stage and growth vehicles demonstrate the team’s commitment to supporting founders in Southeast Asia from pre-seed to pre-IPO.

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GX Bank Berhad (GXBank) announced that it is the first of the five digital bank licence applicants to obtain approval to commence operations in Malaysia. GXBank is a subsidiary of GXS Bank – the digital bank joint venture between Grab and Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel), as well as a consortium of Malaysian investors including Kuok Group.

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Meta may be just-short-of-criminally irresponsible, but at least they’re consistent. Having decided that news coverage isn’t important to their business, even though Meta is an important news source for many people, they’ve decided to remove their Facebook News section in the UK, Germany and France. They haven’t yet blocked links from news sites, as they did in Canada, but that seems certain to follow.

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Meanwhile, for your list of Things There’s No Reason for Meta to Do, you can add an “all-in-one multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model” that aims to provide a universal speech and text translator across nearly 100 languages. They haven’t actually released the system, but have posted a one-sentence demo and technical resources for researchers. It’s not like Meta has better places to spend the money, such as improving content moderation or chasing down fake news.

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Fifty.io identifies advertising audience segments using advanced contextual analysis. They recently teamed with Scope3 to let clients measure the carbon impact of their campaigns. All good and noble, but the International Energy Agency estimates global energy-related CO2 emissions were over 36.8 billion metric tons in 2022 while Scope3 estimates that digital advertising creates 7.2 million metric tons (or maybe 13.9 million, although I couldn’t find the source of that figure). That’s roughly 0.02% of the whole, which, one might argue, isn’t enough to matter.

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One of web publishers’ worst nightmares is that generative AI will answer search questions without sending users to their websites. With global anti-trust authorities already watching it closely, Google has been very cautious in how it handles this. Their latest approach in their experimental generative search engine is to embed clickable links to source materials within the answers. Seems like a move in the right direction.

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Feisty regulators are also on Microsoft’s case. Responding to EU criticisms, they are now unbundling the Teams collaboration platform from Office 365. The change only applies in Europe, since US regulators continue to be much more lax.

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