Not much, when you come right down to it. But marketing services agency Direct Services Inc. has nonetheless launched GDPRtoons, which illustrates key GDPR issues in ways they hope will amuse you. Hey, if that’s what it takes.
SAP Hybris has purchased customer identity management vendor Gigya. TechCrunch reported the price was $350 million. Gigya lets consumers register and then manage their information centrally. This becomes increasingly important as GDPR and similar regulations outside the U.S. give consumers more legal power over how their data is used. As our friends at Equifax have recently demonstrated, consumers within the U.S. have pretty much no data rights whatsoever.
Then again, why should creatives be the only people helped (or replaced) by robots? “Big data-as-a-service company” Qubole has created an autonomous data platform to do data extracts, loads, transformations, stream processing, machine learning, reporting, and ad hoc analysis. How you automate ad hoc is beyond me, but whatever. The core AI skills here are to automatically analyze data use, provide insights about it to human users, and create autonomous agents that take over routine activities.
Do not confuse Snow Software, which helps companies track IT costs, with Snowflake, a cloud database often used for CDP-ish solutions. Do take note that Snow has just been sold to Flexera, which also helps companies optimize their return on tech investments. It’s a helpful reminder that cost-conscious IT departments are more than happy to “help” marketers who are doing a poor job of controlling tech spend.