Podcasting companies haven’t cornered all the acquisition fun. TechTarget is buying Enterprise Strategy Group, which provides technology companies with research and other content, including the occasional podcast. You may recall that TechTarget bought BrightTalk last month for $150 million.
Twitter also has a new podcast-related bauble. They just bought Breaker, which lets podcast listeners comment on episodes, share favorites, and do other things which make the usual Twitter experience such a civilized delight. The Breaker app will soon be discontinued as Breaker staff takes charge of Twitter’s audio-based social networking product, which inexplicably is not named Screech.
Welcome to 2021, Dear Reader. We have some leftover acquisitions in the bin but they seem a pretty lame start for a new year. So let’s instead look at some big picture surveys, starting with Deloitte’s annual Tech Trends report. At 166 pages, you won’t digest in one sitting. If time is tight, jump to page 141 to list the key tech for personalized experiences.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.