Speaking of escape from oppressive regimes, e-commerce vendor Shogun has raised $67.5 million to help companies create alternatives to selling their products through Amazon and other marketplaces. Shogun offers tools to build ecommerce storefronts that connect with platforms including Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce – putting the head in headless, as it were. Shogun has now raised $114.5 million total.
Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other big tech players are pushing back against Hong Kong’s new data protection law, asking for clarifications in rules that could criminalize publishing personal data. A June 25 letter from the Asia Internet Coalition said the companies might “refrain from investing and offering their services in Hong Kong” but later discussions made clear this is unlikely.
Connected TVs are another escape path from the walled gardens and (some) privacy constraints. TV maker VIZIO has just certified several vendors for meeting the Open Addressable Ready (OAR) specifications for TV ad targeting. VIZIO can serve ads on more than 11 million addressable TVs in the U.S. OAR members include AMC Networks, Comcast NBCUniversal, Discovery Networks, Disney, EW Scripps, Fox, Hearst Television, Univision, ViacomCBS, VIZIO and WarnerMedia.
Salesforce announced three enhancements to Salesforce Data Cloud at Dreamforce this week. There is an expansion of unstructured data types it can address including audio and video; there will be a sub-second “real time” layer for data from ingestion to activation; and the connector eco-system has been expanded. Salesforce also emphasized close collaboration between Data Cloud and its new Agentforce AI bots.