If the high-pitched screech of a dial-up modem brings back fond memories, you may be delighted to learn that Verizon Media is being renamed as Yahoo after being sold to a private equity firm. Verizon Media bought Yahoo in 2017 and AOL in 2015 for a combined $9 billion but the current sale values them at around half that amount. Oopsies.
Databook collects public data about companies, analyzes it to identify opportunities, and feeds these into company CRM systems along with recommended messages for target individuals and accounts. They just raised a $16 million Series A with investors including Microsoft and Salesforce venture funds.
Maybe it’s National Stick to Your Knitting Day: Meredith Corporation is selling its local TV stations for $2.7 billion, leaving it free to concentrate on its core publishing brands, which include People, Better Homes & Gardens, and Allrecipes. Those may sound old-fashioned but Meredith already makes more from digital advertising than print advertising. This might be a good time to sell: TV viewing time dropped 9% in the first quarter of this year and is expected to fall further.
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.