Spotify just bought Whooshkaa, another Australian firm. They have a platform that converts audio content like radio broadcasts into on-demand podcasts, handling everything from hosting to promotion to monetization to measurement. It’s part of Spotify’s on-going push into the podcast industry.
It’s acquisitions all the way down today, Dear Reader. GumGum, which applies computer vision and natural language processing to analyze online content for contextual ad targeting, has purchased Australia-based Playground xyz, which uses eye-tracking technology to measure how much time people spend looking at ads. I guess there are still humans involved somewhere.
I was hoping for an all-Australia edition, or at least all-obscure-company-names. But IDG Communications blew it by buying LeadSift, which is Canadian and does what its name suggests: they scan the Web to identify relevant leads for their clients. It’s IDG’s third acquisition in eighteen months as they expand their ability to deliver B2B marketing and sales data.
Enterprise AI vendor Uniphore has acquired CDP ActionIQ and cloud data engineering system Infoworks. The combination of products will create a Zero Data AI Cloud that simplifies AI deployments by enabling companies to access data for AI projects without moving it from existing systems. Prices were not announced.