Now that you’re in the mood to read industry reports, here’s one about privacy and security funding. Crunchbase reports nearly $10 billion was invested in the industry in 2019, a relatively modest 11% increase over 2018, which itself was up 44% over 2017. Yes, this is a big industry.
I don’t mean to be cranky, Dear Reader, but today’s theme is basically “stuff you don’t care about but is the best I could find”. We’ll start with something you might find genuinely interesting: cross-screen attribution vendor TVSquared has launched a global solution to unify reporting on linear and digital TV advertising. Good stuff, but TVSquared has been doing cross-screen attribution for years, so it’s not clear exactly what’s new.
We don’t have another location-related item but here’s one more piece of AI-related funding. This is a $22.1 million Series B for Outlier, which uses automated analysis to produce “proactive, actionable insights” based on changes in data patterns. It all happens “without requiring any configuration or set-up” although you do still have to crawl out of bed in the morning.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.