Today’s news is all about easing frustrations. We’ll start with OpenPath from ad buying platform The Trade Desk, which lets advertisers avoid the usual programmatic bucket brigade and buy direct from premium publishers. It’s a sign of how frustrated everyone is with the current adtech briar patch.
South African API fintech startup Stitch has raised a US$21 million Series A funding round to expand its team, launch new product offerings, and enter new markets across the continent. The Stitch API allows developers to connect apps to financial accounts within minutes, allowing their users to share their transaction histories and balances, confirm their identities, and initiate payments. This tool allows companies to innovate with new and improved services including personal finance, lending, insurance, payments and wealth management. Stitch also enables fintechs to work with traditional financial institutions in... Read More >
Validity is helping frustrated sales teams with GridBuddy Connect, a friendly-sounding tool that shows data from multiple sources on a single screen. It seems the data is presented side-by-side rather than being truly integrated, but that’s better than nothing. The system “understands” its data sources so users can create their own view without writing any code.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.