As people become more used to talking to their consumer devices, will they also expect to talk to their business systems? Business intelligence vendor Qlik is betting they will, with its acquisition of conversational analytics tool CrunchBot and its parent Crunch Data. Users will be able to pose natural language questions within Qlik’s own products, within tools like Slack and Skype, and, yes, by asking Amazon Alexa.
Stream processing – which treats data as a continuous stream of events – is increasingly important to marketers and CDPs. Confluent, whose founders created the open source Apache Kafka streaming data engine, just raised a $125 million Series D, bringing their total to $206 million. It’s yet another example of open source technology in the marketing stack.
One advantage that voice devices have over phones is fewer ads, although that is likely to change. At the moment, mobile ads can be both annoying and security risks. Geoedge, helps publishers block problematic Internet ads, has added similar protection for in-app ads. It’s hard to imagine Amazon or Google allowing Geoedge to interfere with voice device ads but who knows what tomorrow will bring?
When BlueConic bought experience builder platform Jebbit last July, it positioned the combination as “the industry’s first-ever Operating System for Customer Data”. In case their meaning wasn’t clear, they’ve now directly integrated Jebbit with BlueConic profiles and segmentation, enabling marketers to launch no-code quizzes, surveys and personalized guided journeys without leaving the CDP.