Cloud-based communications platform Twilio is buying toll-free messaging platform Zipwhip to expand its multi-channel message delivery capabilities. Price is $850 million in cash and stock. Growth of multi-channel cloud platforms is one of the trends we’ve been watching. You’ll recall that Twilio bought the Segment CDP last year for $3.2 billion.
Explorium clearly isn’t a CDP but it also gathers data in its own way. Specifically, it analyzes predictive models and searches its library for external data sources that could help the models work better. They just raised a $75 million Series C. They also released an interesting survey on external data acquisition: 62% use external demographics data and 51% collect anonymized individual data.
AT&T is spinning off its WarnerMedia unit and combining it with Discovery, Inc. to create an even larger media business. AT&T shareholders will own 71% of the combined business while Discovery shareholders own 29%. This matters to you, Dear Reader, because the new entity will collect even more customer data than before.
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.