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.
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.