Personalization engine (and CDP) SessionM announced $23.8 million in new funding, with Salesforce Ventures as a lead investor. Coming on the heels of Salesforce’s Datorama acquisition last week, it suggests somebody at Salesforce has a new interest in customer data integration. You may also recall that SessionM expanded its own Salesforce integrations last week. Total funding is now $97.3 million.
Business intelligence vendor Qlik has purchased data integration platform Podium Data. Podium lets non-technical users ingest, transform, and publish all types of data, including personal identifiers, on a Hadoop foundation. We never identified it as a CDP but it probably qualifies. As this article from Xconomy points out, there have been quite a few acquisitions of data management platforms recently – including the Salesforce / Datorama deal.
Why should bad guys have all the data moving fun? Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft have plans for an open source data portability platform that will make it easy to share personal data between platforms. This would make it easier for people to switch providers although a cynic would also note it makes unauthorized sharing easy too.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.