At $4+ billion revenue, Shopify is big but not Big Tech. But it’s taking a page from the Big Tech playbook with Audiences, which will aggregate customer behaviors from participating merchants to develop target audiences that can then reached through Facebook and LinkedIn. The new feature will help to overcome the loss in targeting capabilities resulting from Apple’s tighter privacy rules.
Microsoft is a charter member of the Big Tech club, but testing a retail marketplace within its Bing search engine makes it sound like a scrappy upstart nipping at the ankles of Amazon and Google. The new marketplace will let consumers buy within the search results instead of sending them to retailers’ websites. Details are sketchy but the marketplace may do targeting with information gathered by other Microsoft products – which puts the story back into the “Big Tech exploiting your data” department.
Early-stage VC firm Launch Africa Ventures has made its 100th investment, making it probably the most active investor in African tech startups, and closed its first fund at US$36.3 million.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.