The MarTech Minute: Amazon eyes blockchain for ads, Visa’s machine learning fraud protection

MarTech Minute briefs always appear first in our daily newsletter throughout the week. Click here to subscribe. The following is our compilation of the past week’s briefs from those newsletters.

Barracuda acquires bot mitigation tech from InfiSecure. The cybersecurity firm announced that it has purchased bot mitigation technology from InfiSecure with plans to expand its bot protection capabilities. The application-specific solution uses a layer of machine learning to provide automatic and custom profiling of individual applications for optimal protection. The strategic move is expected to strengthen Barracuda’s existing portfolio of application security solutions.

Evergage releases data warehouse solution. Customer data platform Evergage announced the launch of the Evergage Data Warehouse which seeks to give business analysts access to rich, unified customer and prospect data. Analysts will be able to use the existing reporting capabilities within Evergage to create dashboards to slice and dice data. The solution also integrates with other analytics solutions including Tableau and Looker.

Openrise releases new campaign attribution capabilities. The data orchestration solutions provider released new campaign attribution capabilities to its customers, including first, last and multi-touch attribution to monitor touchpoint impact across customer journeys. The attribution models also address common data challenges, including duplicate leads and contacts, opportunities without contacts and mass lead uploads.

ViacomCBS claims 22% of prime time TV audience. The initial growth focus of the newly formed company will be in streaming direct-to-consumer business. “The first part of our strategy is accelerating growth of our D2C [direct-to-consumer] offering…subscription and ad-supported offerings,” said Bob Bakish, future president of ViacomCBS. 

Accenture Interactive to acquire design firm. Accenture has entered a deal to acquire service design and research firm, INSITUM. The firm plans to add INSITUM to its growing design and innovation business unit, Fjord, and is expected to grow its footprint in the LATAM market, particularly in Mexico where INSITUM is headquartered.

PikMobile launches ad-free, data collection-free social network. The new network, aptly dubbed Safe Social, promises users a social experience free of advertising as well as data collection. “People who use social media worry about their data being collected and how it is being used,” said Scott Relf, CEO and co-founder of PikMobile. “They are desperate for an alternative social experience where there are no ads and no data collecting, and where no one is manipulating which friends and posts you see.”

Ovation raises $1 million in seed funding. The relationship enablement platform for restaurants and retailers announced the round of seed funding led by Monta Vista Capital. The company intends to use the capital to build new tools for retailers and restaurants looking to drive customer retention. “Businesses of the future will be around in the future because they have built relationships with their customers — and that is what our technology enables,” said Ovation founder and CTO, Scott Weinert.

Kakapo Systems adds email queues for BroadSoft. The developer of end-user apps for Cisco’s BroadSoft platform has added the availability of email queues, building on the existing suite that includes web chat, Twitter and callback queues. “Email is one of the most accessible customer contact routes but trying to manage shared mailbox through traditional email platforms is often totally unworkable,” said Steve Tutt, marketing director at Kakapo Systems. “This solution is tailored for SMB customers, allowing them to embed email routing within their existing ACD customer service channel. Emails are delivered to Agents in the same interface they handle BroadSoft ACD calls.” 

Visa will add supervised machine learning for fraud protection. Visa will roll out a cloud-based platform later this year that will test deep-learning algorithms to better detect unauthorized transactions. The platform, built in-house, will use machine learning to detect patterns in transactions that could indicate criminal behavior.

Odaseva launches app to anonymize customer PII from Salesforce Full Sandbox. Personally identifiable information (PII) in a testing environment such as Salesforce Full Sandbox, which creates an exact copy of an organization’s Salesforce instance for user testing and training, could pose a compliance risk to Salesforce users. Odaseva’s Full Sandbox Anonymization application will automatically mask PII to help Salesforce customers stay compliant.

Amazon looks to put advertising data on a new blockchain. As Amazon steadily carves itself a space in the blockchain world, the company hinted that it may be looking to create an advertising blockchain. A job posting on LinkedIn did not share many details but calls the position “an opportunity to define a technology architectural direction of a greenfield area for Amazon’s advertising business using Blockchain technology.”