Speaking of old-school, do you remember when offices had “postal meters” to send “mail”? (Come to mention it, do you remember “offices”?) Well, those postal meters were likely made Pitney Bowes, which also had a software business related to customer data management that until it sold it last December to data integrity vendor Syncsort. Syncsort today renamed itself as Precisely.
Facebook is purchasing .gif platform Giphy for a reported $400 million. Half of Giphy’s traffic comes from non-Facebook properties, so the deal will expand Facebook’s ability to observe and profit from behavior elsewhere. The deal won’t put a dent in Facebook’s $60 billion cash hoard.
Pivotree helps companies select, deploy, and support commerce and master data management systems from vendors including Oracle, Magento, SAP, and Informatica. They just launched a rapid-implementation Buy Online, Pickup In Store (BOPIS) solution to help companies add curbside pickup. Plenty of companies are making similar offers right now, so this item is our way of noting the trend.
“Ask Meta AI anything” is what you now see instead of the traditional search bar across Meta apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta AI will still perform the basic search function but will also answer questions and chat with you. It should hardly be a surprise when a tech company launches a genAI solution these days but this is a bold challenge to Google and Open.ai (it’s also available as a standalone tool at Meta.ai).