One GDPR-induced crisis is resolved: Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern, is back at work despite his scandalous behavior at our GDPR Day party last week. He offers this study from Performics, Microsoft, and Northwestern University, proving that search queries with terms like “shop” indicate that someone is interested in buying things. You read it here first.
Lots of fun product news today. First we have the official launch of conDati, which assembles marketing data from multiple sources and uses it for reports, visualization, and forecasting. conDati ingests data from advertising, Web analytics, email, social, and marketing automation systems but seems to work at the level of campaigns, not individual customers. They raised a $4.7 million Series A earlier this month.
Here’s a little reminder of what could go wrong: a Portland woman found her Alexa device had sent a recording of her private conversation to an email contact without permission. (Portlandia fans will be especially amused.) Amazon found the device was functioning properly but misunderstood background noises as instructions. Related: researchers have found they can embed undetectable smart device voice commands within recorded songs. Remind me again why we need these devices?
Salesforce has reversed course on its bid to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica a source has told Reuters. Informatica itself said that it is not in talks to be acquired. Salesforce stocks rose on this latest news while Informatica’s fell.