Continuing in our glass half empty/half full mode, Adobe found mixed reports from workers stuck at home: 32% said they were more productive and 23% said they were less productive than they were in the office. The remaining 45% saw no difference. The most missed features of office life were team collaboration and informal chats with co-workers. Bosses may be sad to learn the least missed was direct access to their supervisor.
Aphersis raises €2.5M for privacy-safe data sharing Aphersis, which ensures secure, private data collaboration and analysis for global pharma, manufacturing and telecom companies, has just received seed funding from top-tier investors, including Twitter’s board chair. The company uses decentralized computing, federated learning and cryptographic protocols to make it possible to share highly sensitive data.
If you’ve been wondering how much mobile device usage grew during the pandemic, App Annie has some answers: mobile hours were up 25% compared with the second half of 2019 and ad placements in June 2020 were 70% higher than June 2019. PubMatic’s quarterly mobile ad report found similar growth and a surge in ads bought through private marketplaces: these are expected to account for 51% of programmatic mobile ad spending, exceeding the volume on open exchanges. Private marketplaces offer less risk of inappropriate placements than open exchanges.
Enterprise AI vendor Uniphore has acquired CDP ActionIQ and cloud data engineering system Infoworks. The combination of products will create a Zero Data AI Cloud that simplifies AI deployments by enabling companies to access data for AI projects without moving it from existing systems. Prices were not announced.