CDP Institute

Land of Nod cross matches 94% of its customers with anonymized profiles from Conversant. Conversant gathers behavioral data directly and transactional data from around 4,000 retailers to create profiles that link individual across channels and devices. The average Conversant profile combines an average of 14 cookies and devices.

The Weather Company launched Watson Ads today, the first-ever consumer use of IBM Watson technology for advertising purposes. Watson Ads let consumers interact with a brand via IBM Watson, by allowing them to ask questions via voice or text and receive highly personalized information about the brand’s advertised product or offering.

Infer Inc., a leading predictive sales and marketing platform that helps companies win more customers, further expanded its open ecosystem today with a new connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. With this integration, Infer now supports all of the major customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation (MA) platforms, and offers more connectors than any vendor in its industry. By bringing predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) into any application a company uses, Infer helps businesses fuel more intelligent, successful customer growth strategies.

Wipro Limited, a leading information technology, consulting and business process services company, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Appirio, a global cloud services company that creates next generation worker and customer experiences for a purchase consideration of USD 500 Million.

Invoca, the call intelligence company, today launched the Voice Marketing Cloud at its annual Call Intelligence Summit. The Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud is the first solution to connect and inform the entire customer experience, delivering the same capabilities for voice interactions that digital marketing clouds from Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle bring to channels like web, email, social and display.  …

The third quarter of 2016 saw 105 VC and private equity deals in martech companies for a total of $2834.6 million, a 1.25% dip compared to Q3 2015. These figures confirm the consistent growth in martech following a massive Q2, where over $5000 million in funding flowed into martech companies. MarTech Advisor currently tracks over 5,000+ companies spread over 44 categories in their martech list, and while different analysts may track the martech sector differently, most reports suggest a fairly substantial and steady growth in martech funding.

Customer data is dynamic due to the many changes consumers go through in the course of their lives.

[Editor’s note: Ah, the ever-popular Gartner Hype Cycle. Love it or hate it, it’s always interesting. Customer Data Platforms appeared for the first time this year, positioned as just starting the climb to inflated expectations. I’d say CDPs a bit further along than that, but agree that we haven’t seen too much hype yet.]

South Africa’s Nedbank is a leader in its market — but to stay in that position, it needed to identify new ways to serve its existing business clientele as well as attract new customers. Its solution: Use the extensive transaction data the bank collects to help customers improve their service.

In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists.  The researchers reported a word  error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month.

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I’ve been surveying the borders of Customer Data Platform-land recently, trying to figure out which vendors fit within the category and which do not.

Leanplum, the leader in mobile marketing, today announced that it closed a $29 million round in Series C funding. The round was led by Canaan Partners, with participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Shasta Ventures. Since its 2012 launch, the company has raised a total of $46.3 million. Leanplum will use the new funding to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering teams and drive aggressive global expansion. Joydeep Bhattacharyya formerly of Shasta Ventures, who recently joined Canaan Partners, will return to Leanplum board of directors.