CDP Institute

Location is one of the most privacy-sensitive data types, but it’s also one that offers many customer benefits. Bluedot focuses on the advantages by providing real-time alerts that estimate accurately when customers are approaching a business location. Business has been booming during the pandemic as companies seek more efficient curb-side pickup and drive-through purchases. They just raised a $9.1 million Series B, bringing total funding to $20.4 million.

Lytics has launched Lytics View, a quick-start process that generates AI-based offer and product recommendations in as little as one week. Data is fed into the system by Lytics’ own Web site tag, avoiding the delays of conventional data integration. Of course, you’ll probably want to add other sources eventually and there’s still that pesky need to connect with customer-facing systems to deliver the recommendations.

Fivetran is also working to ease integration. They do it with pre-built data connectors that automatically adapt to changes in schemas and APIs. Fivetran isn’t specifically focused on customer data although that’s surely part of their offering. They just raised $100 million Series C, bringing their total to $163 million.

Infutor does focus on customer data and on identity management in particular. They just released an online service that lets companies clean and enhance their CRM data. The service draws on Infutor’s own identity graph of more than 260 million consumers. It applies a persistent ID for identity resolution and tracking over time.

Tealium announced general availability of its automated predictive feature, Predict ML, which it originally revealed last fall. The system can automatically build a model to predict any behavior tracked in the Tealium CDP. It also warns users if inadequate data is available to build a reliable model.

Microsoft hasn’t quite released its Digital Marketing Center, which helps small businesses manage social postings, paid social, and paid search campaigns across Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But it’s moving from very limited pilot to less limited pilot. The pilots are free although we don’t know pricing for the final product.

Microsoft is also on the list of companies joining the #StopHateForProfit Facebook advertising boycott, along with HP, Ford, Honda, Unilever, BestBuy, Denny’s, Pepsi, Hersey, Clorox, and others. The coalition of civil rights organizations behind the boycott rejected adjustments offered by Facebook on Friday and listed demands for substantive changes in policies that foster extremism. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration illustrated its own commitment to free speech by suggesting that Facebook and other social platforms suppress messages from protesters. Oh, and Twitch temporarily suspended Trump from its platform. Busy day.

We’ve already written a couple of times about Salesforce products that help businesses adapt to the pandemic, so I’m reluctant to cover them again. On the other hand, I see few other enterprise software vendors stepping up. So here’s the latest: Salesforce Anywhere, a collection of tools to support work-from-home activities for sales, service and marketing. Some are available now and most will be released over the next few months.

Smaller vendors tend to be more agile. Here’s news of an all-in-one online events platform, which couldn’t be more timely. Vendor is UK-based startup Hopin. They just raised a €35.6 million ($40 million) Series A.

You probably suspected as much, but this Calabrio study confirms that contact centers have largely switched to remote work and 72% of agents are happy with the switch. Less obvious: 72% of managers are satisfied with remote worker productivity. Slightly fewer (63%) expect the pandemic’s impact on customer service will be permanent.

Citizen developers have a new brick to hurl through IT department windows, provided by none other than Amazon Web Services. Honeycode, just launched in beta, is a new AWS managed service that lets users build mobile and Web apps with a spreadsheet-style interface. And you IT people thought AWS was your friend.

Quick: who’s the leading cross-channel marketing cloud platform? If you didn’t say Knorex, you haven’t read their press release. Puffery notwithstanding, they’ve just launched an intriguing AI engine that powers many steps of digital ad management, including cross-channel budget optimization, programmatic bidding, contextual targeting, and campaign strategy recommendation.