Senior Intern Jamie supports both our Department of the Obvious and the Facebook Is Evil team. He couldn’t figure out which one should get this set of Science Magazine editorials concluding that social media makes it tough to communicate sound science. Something about algorithms.
You can add BOPA to your buzzword bingo card. Via.Delivery coined the term Buy Online Pickup Anywhere to describe an ecommerce order delivered to a commercial pickup location instead of the buyer’s home. Somehow the practice has blossomed even without a snappy acronym: the company says nearly 20% of ecommerce shoppers will choose it when given the option, and it already accounts for 70% of deliveries in parts of Europe and Asia.
Adobe announced a bundle of new mobile personalization capabilities in its Journey Optimizer orchestration application, including several powered by real-time-updated profiles in the Adobe CDP. New options include location-aware triggers such as messages sent when a customer enters a store, personalized text messages within a campaign, and in-app messages based on customer profiles, location, and app usage history.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.