One obstacle to selling podcast ads is lack of data about the listeners. Spotify has just released a dashboard that will offer profiles of listeners’ age, gender, location, music tastes and how long they listened to an episode. That should help.
Blockchain often seems over-hyped but one application that always made sense was streamlining the digital ad supply chain. Sure enough, a pilot run by IBM, Unilver, and others has yielded an average two to three percent savings. That’s a small fraction of what goes to intermediaries and fraudsters but presumably benefits will grow over time.
You probably don’t need convincing that chat is important. But you might still be surprised that the function has become so quickly commoditized that Shopify is now offering it at no extra cost. The new tool will show up on all pages of a Shopify ecommerce site.
Salesforce has reversed course on its bid to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica a source has told Reuters. Informatica itself said that it is not in talks to be acquired. Salesforce stocks rose on this latest news while Informatica’s fell.