Bounteous

Bounteous Acquires Cartesian to Accelerate Enterprise AI

Bounteous, an AI services firm, announced the acquisition of Cartesian, a specialist consulting firm focused on telecommunications, media and technology. The deal expands Bounteous’ data, analytics and AI capabilities, strengthens its telecommunications expertise, and increases its presence across North America and Europe. Cartesian—with over three decades of industry experience and offices in London, Boston, New York and Paris—will continue to operate under CEO Jim Serafin within the combined organization. Bounteous CEO Sudarshan Mandayam said the acquisition addresses data-foundation challenges that hinder enterprise AI. The combined organization now totals more than 5,000 specialists across AI services, data, analytics, cloud and experience design, aiming to help Fortune 1000 and global enterprise clients scale AI from data foundations through enterprise delivery.

Boris On IPONWEB Winding Down In Moscow; Netflix Will Turn Up The Heat On Account Sharing

AdExchanger's March 17, 2022 roundup covers two principal stories. IPONWEB founder Boris Mouzykantskii reports that operating an R&D center in Moscow has become untenable for a global company, prompting relocation assistance and relocation of about 30% of the Moscow team, with Berlin expanding as the European engineering hub. This comes as a $380 million acquisition of IPONWEB by Criteo, announced in December 2021 and slated to close in Q1 2022, faces potential war-related disruption. Separately, Netflix is testing a tool in Costa Rica, Chile, and Peru to enforce account-sharing rules, offering users either higher payments or removal of non-household subscribers, following a January price rise of $2 per month. The roundup also notes ongoing fraud in programmatic video and industry moves toward programmatic guaranteed and clean rooms to improve analytics.

ViacomCBS Becomes Paramount; Why Bing Users Actually Use Bing

Paramount rebranded ViacomCBS as Paramount, emphasizing Paramount Plus as its growing streaming core. Paramount Plus has 32.8 million subscribers, and Q4 streaming sign-ups totaled 9.4 million (7.3 million to Paramount Plus). Subscription revenue rose 84% year over year, while linear advertising revenue declined 1%. Overall Q4 revenue reached $8.0 billion, up 16% YoY, driven largely by streaming; however, stock fell after hours on a miss vs. forecasts. Separately, The Verge discussed Bing’s user base, and Spotify announced acquisitions of Podsights and Chartable to bolster podcast analytics. The roundup also notes regulatory and ad-tech updates and leadership moves in marketing agencies.