Marketing-data company Acxiom is shopping around LiveRamp, a data-migration firm it acquired just four years ago for $310 million, according to industry insiders.
LiveRamp is known as a "data-onboarding" company. It essentially helps big companies move around databases in a safe, privacy-respectful manner.
With GDPR — or General Data Protection Regulation— going into effect on May 25, a company that can promise tech vendors safer data usage, or the appearance of data safety, would suddenly be highly valuable, from both a business and public-relations perspective.
To read more about why Acxiom might be looking to sell LiveRamp and its potential buyers, click here.
In other news:
"Everyone is excited about AR": Quartz wants to get ahead in a hot new ad category. Atlantic Media-owned Quartz is beginning to sell AR ads within its chatbot news app, which has more than one million downloads.
"The market basically flipped on us in a six-month period": Why mobile-ad company Kargo decided to blow up a $100 million business. Kargo made its name building an ad network that sold a variety of custom mobile banners for publishers such as CNN, but over the past six months it's deliberately ripped up its business model. Instead of selling ads on a deal-by-deal basis, it has raced to morph into a software-driven ad platform.
YouTube's new subscription plans are a bad deal if you just want to watch videos. YouTube announced on Thursday that it's restructuring its paid YouTube Red service into two new services that are launching on May 22, including YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium.
IBM says it is absolutely not looking for a new CEO despite swirling rumors that other candidates are being approached by top recruiting firms. IBM's current CEO, Ginni Rometty, is bucking a long-standing tradition at IBM by not retiring at age 60, and her tenure has been controversial but she seems to be turning the company around.
Paypal is gaining ground after announcing its $2.2 billion acquisition of a European competitor of Square. The deal is Paypal's largest acquisition to date and would put the company in the field of physical payments.
