Stream processing – which treats data as a continuous stream of events – is increasingly important to marketers and CDPs. Confluent, whose founders created the open source Apache Kafka streaming data engine, just raised a $125 million Series D, bringing their total to $206 million. It’s yet another example of open source technology in the marketing stack.

One advantage that voice devices have over phones is fewer ads, although that is likely to change. At the moment, mobile ads can be both annoying and security risks. Geoedge, helps publishers block problematic Internet ads, has added similar protection for in-app ads. It’s hard to imagine Amazon or Google allowing Geoedge to interfere with voice device ads but who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.