Technology

Another legacy carrier built on offering phone services is now taking a deeper dive into the world of advertising and specifically ad tech to help catapult itself into the next generation of tech and communications. Today, AT-T confirmed that it is buying AppNexus, a programmatic advertising marketplace that competes against the likes of Google and Facebook and describes itself as the worldlargest independent digital ad exchange.

Todayrelease did not reveal any financial terms, except to note that the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018.An AT-T spokesperson has told TechCrunch that AT-T is not commenting on the terms of the deal.

The news caps off a week of speculation after it was reported last week that AT-T was eyeing up the company for about $1.6 billion, and it comes just weeks after AT-T closed its deal to buy TimeWarner for nearly $85 billion.

AppNexus reportedly confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2016, valuing the company at between $1.5 billion and $2 billion although that deal appeared never to materialise. AppNexus had raised about $344 million from a range of investors including News Corp., WPP, Fidelity, TCV, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, Khosla, and many more.

AppNexus says that some34,000 publishers and 177,000 brands use its marketplace today to connect ads with ad placements and audiences to see them. The company is also an ad tech play, providing a range of tools to measure engagement and optimise performance of ads.AT-T said that it plans to put AppNexus under its existing advertising and analytics division.

As with Verizon and other carriers, AT-T has been working on ways of expanding its advertising business on top of its existing mobile network and broadband access operations, and now its extensive content operations.

Carriers like AT-T are between a rock and a hard place these days. On one side, their broadband and mobile (and, to an increasingly lesser extent, fixed voice) networks have become increasingly commoditised over the years. On the other side, they are being squeezed by companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and a plethora of media and other tech companies. These companies dominate in content and &owning& consumers as subscribers, app users and smartphone brands, leaving little room for carrier to do much.

Buying TimeWarner will have given AT-T a seat at the table when it comes to video and other entertainment, and now it is adding more technology to help monetise that content.

Advertising — and ad tech — represent opportunities for carriers like AT-T to grow their revenues around the data that they already have about their connectivity customers — which in AT-Tcase exceeds 170 million &direct-to-consumer relationships across its wireless, video and broadband businesses.& Notably, AppNexus is &independent& of any of that range of media and tech titans. And while AT-T is focused mainly on the US market, AppNexus will give it further reach into Asia-Pacific, Australia, Europe, and Latin America.

(This was also the rationale behind Verizonacquisition of AOL, which owns TechCrunch, and later Yahoo, which together are now branded as Oath.)

&Ad tech unites real-time analytics and technology with our premium TV and video content,& said Brian Lesser, CEO of the division at AT-T. &So, we went out and found the strongest player in the space. AppNexus has scale of infrastructure, advanced technology and diverse talent. The combination of AT-T advertising - analytics and AppNexus will help deliver a world-class advertising platform that provides brands and publishers a new and innovative way to reach consumers in the marketplace today.&

Although AT-T could have built this from the ground up, this bolts on some 400 engineers and IP and an existing business to the company.

AT-T says it &will continue to invest in and build on AppNexus& foundational technology as it integrates with AT-Tfirst-party data, premium video content and distribution.&

&Innovation is core to the heritage of both AT-T and AppNexus, and we have an exciting opportunity to chart the future course of advertising together,& said Brian O&Kelley, CEO, AppNexus, in a statement. &Combining AT-Tincredible assets with our technology, we will help brands and marketers power new advertising experiences for consumers. Itwhat the market is asking for, and together we&re poised to deliver it.&

AT-Tad-supported premium video content portfolio currently includes Turner Networks,Audience Network, and Otter Media.

Apple News has a new old mission: Curating political news and analysis by paying a team of experienced human editors to quality-assess journalism, rather than letting unchecked algorithms run wild and exaggerate anything — no matter how awful, obnoxious or untrue.

‘Fakebook& eat your heart out.

Apple says human curation is not a new direction for Apple News — describing it as a &guiding principle& across the product since it launched three years ago.

Although it certainly wasn&t shouting so loudly about it back then when algorithmic feeds were still riding high.But the company says Apple News has always had a team of editors — which it says are focused on &discovering and spotlighting well-sourced fact-based stories to provide readers with relevant, reliable news and information from a wide range of publishers&.

Those &experienced& editors are also now being put to work assessing political reportage and commentary around the US midterms. With only publishers they deem to be &reliable& getting to be political sources for Apple News.

The launch is focused on theUS 2018 midterm elections, at least initially, which will get a dedicated section in the product — providing what Cupertino bills as&timely, trustworthy midterm election information& along with &the most important reporting and analysis from a diverse set of publishers&.

We&ve asked the company whether it plans to expand the Apple News election section approach to other markets.

&Today more than ever people want information from reliable sources, especially when it comes to making voting decisions,& said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News, in a statement. &An election is not just a contest; it should raise conversations and spark national discourse. By presenting quality news from trustworthy sources and curating a diverse range of opinions, Apple News aims to be a responsible steward of those conversations and help readers understand the candidates and the issues.&

Apple is clearly keen to avoid accusations of political bias — hence stressing the section will include a &diverse range of opinions&, with content being sourced from the likes of Fox News, Vox, the Washington Post, Politico and Axios, plus other unnamed publishers.

Though there will equally clearly be portions of the political spectrum who decry Apple News& political output as biased against them — and thus akin to political censorship.

Safe to say, don&t expect Breitbart to be a fan. But as any journalist worth their salt will tell you, you can&t please all the people all of the time. And not trying to do so is essentially a founding tenet of the profession. Italso why algorithms suck at being editors.

The launch of a dedicated section for an election event within Applenews product is clearly a response to major failures where tech platforms have intersected with political events — at least wherebusiness models rely on fencing content at vast scale and thus favor algorithmic curation (with all the resulting clickbaity, democracy-eroding pitfalls that flow from that).

Concern about algorithmic impacts on democratic processes continues to preoccupy politicians and regulators in the US and beyond.And while itfair to say that multiple tech platforms have a fake news and political polarization problem, Facebook has been carrying the biggest can here, given how extensively Kremlin agents owned its platform during the 2016 US presidential elections.

Since then the company has announced a raft of changes intended to combat this type of content — including systems to verify political advertisers; working with third party fact checkers; closing scores of suspect accounts around elections; and de-emphasizing news generally in its News Feed in favor of friends& based updates which are harder for malicious agents to game at scale.

But its core algorithmic approach to programming the hierarchies of content on its platform has not changed.

And while itramping up the number of content moderation and safety staff on its books — saying it will have 20,000 people working on that by the end of this year — thatstill reactive content assessment; which is the polar opposite of editorial selection and curation.

So Apple evidently sees an opportunity for its News product to step in and fill the trust gap with reliable political information.

As well as general news and commentary from the selected trusted publishers, Apple says it will also include &special features with stories curated by Apple News editors from trusted publishers&, including opinion columns &about hot-button issues that are intended to offer readers a full range of ideas and debate about important subjects, from news sources they may not already follow& (so italso taking aim at algorithmically generated filter bubbles); and an election dashboard from the Washington Post — which contextualizes &key data like current polling, what pundits are saying and survey data on voter enthusiasm&.

Local news is another focus for the section, with a feature that aims to highlight &quality reporting about issues that matter to local constituents on the most important races&.

The 2018 Midterm Elections section is available to Apple News users in the US from now until November.

Itnot often you can get three cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce to agree on much of anything, but today they were all part of a $27 million Series C investment in Tact.ai, a startup that has been trying to change the way sales people interact with information in CRM systems using voice.

Amazon Alexa Fund, Salesforce Ventures andM12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) joined Comcast Ventures as strategic investors in the company this round. Traditional VCs Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Upfront Ventures also participated. Tact has now raised over $53 million, according to Crunchbase.

Amazon is of course deeply invested in voice interfaces and has recognized what Tact is trying to do in an enterprise setting with this investment. In fact, Tact was one of the first services to launch as part ofAlexa for Businesslast fall. &Just as people were quick to adopt voice technology in the home, we see an enormous opportunity for voice services in the enterprise,& Paul Bernard, Director of the Amazon Alexa Fund said. He sees Tact on the forefront of that movement.

As though to prove Amazonpoint, the company also announced a product enhancement to improve the voice experience in the car. The feature dubbed ‘Voice Intelligence& acts like a car-based virtual assistant. Sales people spend much of their time in the car, and the tool can not only give them the basics about the next meeting, it can also provide details about the deal and other relevant information, such as recently filed service tickets. All of this info can arm the salesperson for a potentially more effective meeting, Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi explained.

&We want sales professionals who are on the road, keeping their eyes on the road ahead, so we are pushing information to them and initiating a conversation, which is exactly what a human assistant would do,& he said.

Ganapathi understands the limitations of CRM tools perhaps better than anyone. Thatbecause before he started Tact, he had been helping build them for more than 20 years — first custom systems with Ernst and Young, then on prem with Siebel Systems and finally with Salesforce in the cloud.

CRMvalue proposition has always been that it provides companies with a central place for storing customer data, an electronic rolodex of sorts, but entering and retrieving data has mostly been a chore for busy sales people. Ganapathi launched Tact in 2012 with the vision of using voice to help make it easier to interact with these tools. He was clearly ahead of his time, but the technology has finally caught up with his idea, and the strategic investors in this deal certainly recognize the value of a voice interface for sales people.

Ganapathi says the idea behind Tact is to reduce the friction involved in adding and retrieving information from the database, and making life easier for sales to do their job. If sales pros can get the information they need, they can potentially make more sales and thata fairly compelling argument for any company.