Evergage has introduced a data warehouse that it says can help firms track behavior across email, website, web and mobile apps and other channels.

The objective is to help brands “perform customized queries and more detailed analyses,” states Evergage CEO Karl Wirth.

According to the company, brands can use the Data Warehouse to:

• Access customer and product data in the Evergage CDP
• Analyze catalog data by products/and or content, and access transactional data, including downloads, online and offline purchase and adds-to-cart
• Use a BI tool of the client’s choosing

Run queries to report and visualize the information.

Data from existing systems — CRM, marketing automation, point-of-sale — are stored in what Evergage calls a Unified Customer Profile. Included are digital interactions, engagement patterns, preferences, intent, purchases, referring source, browser, geolocation, survey responses and weather, the firm says.

One client, Invaluable, uses the product to drive campaigns. "By feeding behavioral and geographic traffic data from Evergage's Data Warehouse into our BI tool Looker, we can easily craft highly customized email campaigns aimed at users who will be the most receptive to them,” states Peter Lehar, business intelligence manager at Invaluable.

Verizon customers with 5G mobile devices are seeing more than eight times improvement in download speeds, according to new Speeedtest data from Ookla.

Tests on Sprint’s 5G connections showed download speeds nearly three times faster compared to download speeds on its LTE network.

Ookla tested 5G speeds of Verizon and Sprint in markets that have the Samsung and Galaxy phones, which both use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X50 modem. The objective was to determine how much faster 5G is than LTE in specific cities, according to a blog post by Ookla.

Data was analyzed from Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Minneapolis and Providence.

Results varied by city. For example, Speedtest data in Dever showed 5G speed improvement of 820%, Atlanta 202% and Minneapolis 918%.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling on Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to put the brakes on a plan to approve T-Mobile's $26 billion acquisition of Sprint.

“We have major antitrust concerns regarding the impact of the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger on consumers, competition, and the public interest,” eight Senate Democrats say in a letter sent to Pai Friday.

The lawmakers, presidential hopefuls Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Cory Booker (New Jersey), Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), and Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), are asking Pai to seek comments from the public before officially signing off on the merger.

The letter comes two days after Pai circulated a draft order approving the deal. He stated that the merger will help bring 5G wireless broadband to rural areas.

The proposed deal can only move forward if it's cleared by both the FCC and the courts.

Late last month, the Justice Department endorsed the takeover, but with the condition that T-Mobile and Sprint divest some assets to satellite provider Dish Network. Dish would then be positioned to enter the wireless market, effectively replacing Sprint as a fourth major carrier.

That proposed settlement is pending before U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly in the District of Columbia. Separately, attorneys general representing 15 states and the District of Columbia are suing in federal court in New York to block the merger on antitrust grounds.

As originally proposed, the deal would have left the country with just three major mobile carriers -- Verizon, AT&T and the newly merged T-Mobile/Sprint  -- all roughly the same size. Critics of that original deal argued that the consolidation would have led to higher prices for consumers, poorer service and fewer incentives for the carriers to invest in their networks.

Klobuchar and the other Senate Democrats said Friday that they are concerned that the Justice Department's proposed settlement terms are too risky.

“The settlement attempts to resolve the competitive concerns with the merger by promising U.S. leadership in 5G by replacing Sprint -- an established wireless carrier with a history of aggressive pricing -- with that of a new carrier created out of Dish, a satellite TV company with no existing mobile network infrastructure, a bundle of spectrum assets, and multi-year service agreements with the merged company,” the lawmakers write. “The risk posed to consumers if Dish Network fails to compete effectively or build its new wireless business is substantial.”

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, also called on the agency to seek comments from the public about the deal.

“I am not convinced that removing a competitor will lead to better outcomes for consumers,” she said on Twitter. “But what I am convinced of is that before the @FCC votes on this new deal negotiated by Washington, the public should have the opportunity to weigh in and comment. Too much here has been done behind closed doors.”

LiveRamp, provider of a data platform, has named Clark Kokich as non-executive chairman of the board.

Kokich replaces Jerry Gramaglia, whose departure was announced in February.

Prior to joining LiveRamp’s board, Kokich served as executive chairman of the board of directors of mobile advertising company Marchex. He also served in executive positions at Marchex. In addition, he was an executive at Razorfish.

LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe praised Gramaglia for his service “during a period of incredible transformation and growth.” 

Bad habits are difficult to break, especially when it comes to reusing a sequence of numbers, letters and symbols in passwords.

Since users tend to reuse old passwords, Google in February launched the Password Checkup extension for Chrome. It displays a warning when someone who has signed up signs in to a site using one of the more than 4 billion user names and passwords Google deems unsafe as a result of a third-party data breach.

The Chrome extension does not automate the process of resetting the password. Users can ignore warnings. It does alert the user that the password is not safe and suggests they use another one. 

In other words, the Chrome extension alerts the user if the password was used to secure an account that was breached. These are the most vulnerable passwords. 

Of the nearly 667,716 people who installed the extension and participated in the research between February 5, 2019 and March 4, 2019, Google managed to scan 21 million log-in user names and passwords, flagging 316,000 as unsafe. This mean 1.5% of logins on the web involve breached credentials. About 26% of Google’s warnings led users to use a new password.

Overall, users opted to ignore 81,368 -- or 25.7% -- of the breach warnings.

The research found that users tend to reuse breached log-ins for some of their most sensitive financial, government, and email accounts. Of the 1,684,851 visits to financial sites, 0.3% received warnings and 18.6% were ignored.

This risk was even more prevalent on shopping sites -- where many users save credit card data -- as well as news, and entertainment sites. Of the 1,007,103 visits to shopping sites, 1.2% received warnings and 16.4% were ignored.

Based on the data, the research shows that users reset 26% of the unsafe passwords flagged by the Password Checkup extension, and 60% of new passwords are secure against guessing attacks, which means attackers would need to try more than one-hundred million guesses before identifying the new password.

Some 48% of the users who installed the extension were from North America, while 29% were from Europe, 17% were from Asia, and the remaining 6% were from around the world. About 71% of users who installed the extension used Windows, 14% used MacOS, 13% ChromeOS, and 2% Linux.

The extension, for now, is unavailable on mobile devices.

Along with the data, Google released two features for the Password Checkup extension. The first is a direct feedback mechanism where users can inform Google about any issues they face through a comment box. The second lets users opt-out of the anonymous telemetry the extension reports, including the number of lookups that surface an unsafe credential.

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