Sentient Technology Holdings has spun off Sentient Ascend, an AI-based Web experience optimization system, which will now be Evolv Technology Solutions. Evolv has also raised $10 million. There are several Evolv’s in the industry but this one, based in San Francisco, is essentially the former Ascend team.
ClickDimensions, which offers a marketing automation add-on for Microsoft Dynamics 365, has just purchased marketing dashboard vendor Sweetspot. There’s a certain CDP-ish ring to the deal, since SweetSpot assembles data from multiple sources (including “almost 50 prebuilt connectors”) and makes it available for analysis. But, no, this doesn’t make ClickDimensions a CDP.
Fraud prevention firm Pixalate took a closer look at digital ad fraud and found 21% of online ads were fraudulent in the fourth quarter of 2018. This was 17% higher the previous quarter, which Pixalate attributed to higher ad volumes make it easier for fraud to slip by undetected. One piece of good news: Websites using ads.txt to verify placements had 23% less invalid traffic than sites that did not.
There’s probably no limit to Amazon’s greed – because capitalism – but there are constraints as governments regulate BigTech more aggressively and, just maybe, the free market works its wonders. Amazon cited “seller sentiment related to the fee” in its statement pulling back from its planned 2% fee on sellers who don’t use its Prime fulfillment services. But looming antitrust cases likely had something to do with it.