ZineOne is yet another web personalization tool, specializing in personalized shopping experiences for anonymous website visitors. Experiences can be tailored using in-session behavior can begin after as few as five clicks. They just raised a $28 million Series C, bringing total funding to $43 million.
Metadata helps B2B marketers optimize their ad buys, but it aims to become a much broader “Marketing Operating System for B2B”. They raised a $40 million Series B in March to support the vision and just spent an unannounced portion to purchase Reactful, which provides website personalization and Account Based Marketing features. More to come, no doubt.
The e-commerce pie isn’t shrinking but growth has slowed as the pandemic tapers down and inflation heats up. This puts Amazon and Shopify in tighter competition. The latest skirmish is a warning to Shopify merchants that installing Amazon’s Buy with Prime button violates the Shopify Terms of Service and could lead to fraudulent orders, stolen customer data, incorrect charges, and hair loss. Okay, they don’t mention hair loss but I think it’s implied.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.