What’s in a name? Zaius meets the CDP definition of building and sharing a unified, persistent customer database. But they add marketing automation features that place them beyond the CDP realm. They’ve just announced an integration with ecommerce platform Shopify, which suggests they’re serving clients much smaller than most CDP vendors. Speaking of names: they have an endorsement on their Web site from someone named McGregor Button.

Location platform Connecthings has launched Herow, which lets app developers create campaigns based on information about physical sites, precise tracking of mobile device user movements, and local conditions such as weather and traffic. The company also released a survey of mobile users that found their current apps get their location wrong 40% of the time, that 60% want mobile experiences customized to personal desires and location, and 72% don’t want their data shared with third parties.

The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.