While brands sometimes buy tech for themselves, most tech acquisitions are still by other tech companies who want to expand their scope or snap up a competitor. Verint, which rather grandiosely calls itself “The Customer Engagement CompanyTM” but basically analyzes phone calls, has expanded the old-fashioned way by purchasing Conversocial, which provides messaging tools for human and bot service agents. Price was $50 million.
The News Gods have been mostly on vacation this week, but they did share that casino and events operator Bally’s Corporation is buying Telescope Inc., which builds real-time engagement solutions for live and online events. The deal will bolster Bally’s interactive brands. It’s an example of brands buying technology companies instead of just using their products.
So many companies are offering post-cookie, cross-channel identity solutions that it’s not clear whether a new one really counts as news. But Samba TV does have an interesting story, starting with data from sensors built into smart TVs and extending that through probabilistic matching to identify all devices in a household. They just launched a proprietary identifier, SambaID, which will let advertisers buy and measure deduplicated household-level audiences across digital devices.
Like the determined optimist who tells his boss the factory is on fire by reporting they’ll soon be able to update their equipment, let’s find some silver linings in a batch of gloomy surveys today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with this Fivetran report, which finds that 85% of data leaders say their company has lost money by basing decisions on bad data, and 66% believe their C-suite can’t tell when that happens. The bright side is there’s lots of room for improvement.