Welcome to the latest edition of the World of DaaS Roundup.
This week's stories share a question: who's really on the other side of the data? Samba reports that a Netflix campaign on TikTok lifted a show's audience 19%, a sign that audiences are forming where traditional measurement can't see them. Cross Screen Media's CPMs put the same viewer at $9 on one streaming platform and $37 on another. Spokeo looks at a job candidate who isn't who they claim to be, the "real fake" interviewers. Salesforce is buying Braze, a $5.7B bet on knowing what customers actually do in real time. And per IPinfo, supermarket fridges in France are sitting online with no password protection.
This one feels a little different, and we have something to share about what's next for the Roundup.
Starting with our next edition, we’re moving to a biweekly schedule. The idea is simple: less rushing to cover every headline, more time to dig into the stories that matter. More original reporting, more context, and a closer look at what’s shaping the data industry.
We’re excited about this next chapter. But first, there’s plenty to get into. 👇🏻
📰 News & Reads
MEMBER SPOTLIGHTS ⭐️
Ashwin Navin, CEO of Samba - A Netflix campaign on TikTok lifted the show's audience 19%, a look at where audiences are actually being built ↗
Follow Ashwin Navin and Aden Zaman on LinkedIn
Harrison Tang, CEO of Spokeo - "Real fake" interview candidates are real people paid to interview for someone else, so identity verification can't stop there ↗
Follow Harrison Tang on LinkedIn
Michael Beach, CEO of 1903 Group and Cross Screen Media - Streaming TV CPMs range from $9 to $37 for the same 30 seconds and the same viewer ↗
Follow Michael Beach and Alexander Hitchcock on LinkedIn
Ben Dowling, Co-CEO of IPinfo - IPinfo's scans showed France's supermarket fridge control systems sat online with no password for months before a cyberattack ↗
Follow Ben Dowling, Co-CEO, and Paul Heywood, Co-CEO, on LinkedIn
INDUSTRY NEWS 🚀
A bet on real time customer behavior - Salesforce to buy Braze for a reported $5.7B ↗
Effectively a licensing market for AI training data - Third Circuit rules headnotes are copyrightable in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS ↗
The Delete Act at work - California fines data broker SalesIntel $36,400 for registering late as its DROP platform passes 500,000 users ↗
Authors get paid - Anthropic to pay Bloomsbury $21M in an AI-training settlement, shared with Harry Potter and other affected authors ↗
Shared definitions for AI agents - Snowflake launches Horizon Context, a governed context layer pulling from 18 sources like Tableau, Power BI, and Databricks ↗
UPCOMING EVENTS⭐️
LightBox is hosting a free live webinar, "Q3 2026 CRE Market Update: What Changed, and What Comes Next," on Wednesday, November 4 at 2 PM ET. Dianne Crocker and Manus Clancy will share exclusive LightBox data on listings, transactions, the year's biggest deals, and top buyers, along with early signals from the LightBox CRE Activity Index. They will also give their outlook for Q4 and 2027.
An Unexpected Data Read For Today.
In two weeks, the US midterms will happen. And the most important ways data and AI shaped the outcome may not be known until 2027.
That’s the conclusion from Harvard’s Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier, who just published the most comprehensive look at AI deployment in the 2026 midterms. Campaigns are using AI for voter targeting, ad optimization, and synthetic content, but much of it is invisible by design.
The same pattern played out with Cambridge Analytica in 2016. We learned how the data was used only after the election was over.
This time, the data is faster, cheaper, and everywhere. The playbook is the same.
Where Data Meets Art
A vacant Duane Reade in Midtown Manhattan is now a 23,000-square-foot art exhibition, and it’s asking exactly the right question.
260 Madison brings together more than fifty artists working across sculpture, new media, and video to examine what happens when systems become autonomous from human life. The exhibition puts two things in tension: platforms that slice people into users, consumers, gig workers, and data points, and the stubborn human instinct to hack and break those systems anyway.
It’s running through November 22 in New York. Free to visit.
More data and art to check out. "Data Never Dies" at IMPAKT in Utrecht is on view through November 15 and includes a piece built around Sims characters one artist made about 20 years ago, surfaced from a mother's old Windows XP laptop. "Scaling Intelligence" at Gray Area in San Francisco opens Wednesday, October 28 (7-10pm) and runs through Sunday, November 1, free, with 11 new AI commissions, including Ira Greenberg's Protobyte Phylogeny, where visitors steer the evolution of digital lifeforms.
🔥 In Case You Missed It…
M&A Funding Roundup
LSEG agreed to buy credit intelligence firm Octus from Permira for about $3.54B in cash, its biggest deal since Refinitiv in 2019.
Tradeweb agreed to acquire electronic credit trading marketplace Trumid for about $1.97B, expanding into earlier stages of the bond lifecycle, with closing targeted for the first half of 2027.
Infillion acquired Foursquare to add location data from 250M US devices and foot-traffic measurement to its ad tech platform.
Prism Data raised $20M Series A led by Story Ventures to scale its cash flow underwriting and credit analytics platform.
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The World of DaaS Team
