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KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech’s report shows aggressive growth in EMEA thanks in large part to the UAE government’s efforts to foster digital transformation and the launch of the Dubai Digital Authority (DDA). According to GoFinance, the digital finance and insurance marketplace, expectations are that Fintech will continue to scale and accelerate.

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ADNOC Distribution, the company’s retail arm has opened ADNOC Oasis outlet, a fully autonomous shop in the UAE, as the beginning of its rollout of AI-powered stores. Customers can buy goods without using a scanner or interacting with a cashier, and they can pay by tap, either with a bank card, doing a QR code scan, or by using their Emirates ID.

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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.

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Also recently, marketing copy generator Anyword raised $21 million, bringing its total to $30 million. They say their system can be trained to copy your brand voice and/or to tailor copy versions for different customer segments. Just a few days before that, writing assistant Writer reported its own $21 million round. Then we have this (hilarious) piece about – and partly by – writing assistant Sudowrite and its $3 million seed round.

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I’d finish with news that Salesforce is buying article writer Narrative Science, but we covered that last week. So I’ll switch to other messaging, where API-friendly communications platform Vonage was just purchased by Ericsson for $6.2 billion. Martech vendors like Twilio are Vonage competitors.

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OpenText, which provides a range of content, document, security, and experience management solutions, is buying email security vendor Zix for $860 million. The company says it will add Zix to SMB data protection platform, which is based on its 2019 acquisition of Carbonite and Webroot.

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We don’t write much about SMB (Small and Mid-size Business) products. But now that I’ve raised the subject, SMB payments and communications platform Podium has raised a $201 million Series D, bringing total funding to $419 million. Podium started as a review-generation platform, but its ability to accept payments within text messages is what’s unusual.

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Yelp reviews are a foundation for many SMB marketing programs, so it’s on-topic today. But their actual news is a man-bites-dog reversal: Yelp has just launched two ad units that let national brands promote themselves by highlighting local companies that carry their goods. Sponsored Collections show ads organized around a theme while Seasonal Spotlight ads present a rotating sample of brand holiday campaigns.

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Amazon, which has amassed a vast amount of sensitive information on customers and whose efforts have gone largely unchecked, has now been shown, via confidential documents reviewed by Reuters, to be running a big lobbying effort used to forestall or gut privacy legislation. The effort, led by a former aid to President Biden, has killed or undermined privacy legislation two dozen states.

CDPI Privacy Newsletter

TikTok users in the US who used the site before October 1 may be eligible for part of the recently settled $92 million class action. The Illinois suit alleged TikToik shared personal data it had collected from users with third parties without user consent. The company, which denies the claim, agreed to the settlement which applied to approximately 89 million users. Claims by eligible users must be submitted before March 1, 2022.

CDPI Privacy Newsletter

A US federal law, newly passed as part of the infrastructure bill, mandates that car makers integrate anti-drunk-driving tech into all new cars within the next three years. Advocates for the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) technology believe the addition of breath-sniffing sensors and finger-scanning detectors will achieve a goal long-sought to prevent drunk driving, while opponents voiced concerns over invasion of privacy.

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Tough position to fill, according to multiple sources familiar with a new role at The Trade Desk (TTD), which runs the ad exchange marketers use to select audiences on an ad bidding exchange. This is a key role as the ad industry heads into a new post-cookie world intending to supplant those with a unified, encrypted form of ID compliant with GDPR regulations. Speculation is that overseeing this for digital ad spending, which is projected to hit $91.44 billion in Western Europe by 2025, is a hard job to commit... Read More >

CDPI Privacy Newsletter