Some say data is the new oil, or maybe the new oil paint. Personally, I think of it as the new bacon. Whatever you call it, the folks at S&P Global think it’s worth lots: so much that they’re merging with data collector IHS Markit in an all-stock transaction valued at $44 billion. Mmmm…data.
Here’s a little stocking stuffer: Admetrics has just launched a freemium version of its Quantify automated campaign experimentation engine. Like its professional big brother, the system combines multivariate testing with Bayesian statistics and machine learning to deliver results more quickly and with less data than traditional A/B tests. And it can automatically introduce new variations as these become available, enabling continuous improvement.
It took just one day after our privacy newsletter called out Microsoft’s Productivity Score as a surveillance nightmare for Microsoft to hide individual information. Okay, lots of other people raised the same issue. Regardless, it shows increasing awareness of workplace privacy issues, especially during the pandemic.
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.