MyBudget, Coopers Brewery and Sweat are all very different companies, but all have two important things in common: Marketing is at their core and data analytics at their fingertips.

To amalgamate three brands into one, while simultaneously streamlining costs and improving profitability and customer satisfaction and brand recognition, is no mean feat.

Innovation has become one of marketing’s biggest buzzwords, but what does it really mean for a CMO to be innovative?

Just how do marketers cope with the proliferation of big data and fast evolving digital platforms and become a brand serious about understanding and leveraging data and automation capabilities?

A bumper crop of new analytics tools has arrived for business users over the past few weeks, and on Tuesday SAP rolled out two fresh examples. Both promising simplicity and usability for non-experts, SAP Predictive Analytics 2.0 offers updated capabilities for enterprises seeking insight into large volumes of data such as from the Internet of Things, while a new Edge edition of SAP's Lumira tool targets small and medium-size businesses with data-discovery features.

Remember what travel was like before GPS? You could usually manage if you were traveling along familiar roads, but go on a long trip and it could get exciting. Which exit were we looking for? Had we passed the red barn? Did the gas station attendant say to turn after three lights or four? And let's not forget the kids in the back seat asking, "When will we get there?" Okay, that part hasn't changed, although the good news is that they can usually see the GPS screen too and answer their own questions.

Facebook is acquiring Wit.ai, a speech-recognition startup whose technology could give the social network new ways to let users connect verbally.

Customers are happy for businesses to use their data for marketing so long as it’s relevant, according to data scientists at Optus and Medibank.

Yahoo has reached an agreement to acquire Flurry, a mobile analytics company, as part of a push to grow its advertising revenue within its mobile products.

Yahoo has released an Android personalisation app that could give the company a stronger foothold in mobile contextual search.

A stronger set of features, possibly including payments, might be coming to Facebook's messaging properties now that former PayPal president David Marcus has come to work for the social network.

Microsoft plans to boost its Azure cloud services with its acquisition of Capptain, whose product helps developers track and analyze usage of their Web and mobile apps and implement customer retention strategies.

It might be time to change the adage "the customer is always right" to, "the customer with the most followers is always right."

Businesses still struggle to hone in on the most appropriate social metrics. Far too many firms emphasize vanity metrics when there remains little agreement over the true value of a follower, friend, retweet, reblog, pin or like.

Salesforce.com is releasing Social Studio, a new product that combines features from its Radian6 social-media-monitoring technology with the content publishing capabilities of its Buddy Media software for marketers.

Aiming to play a bigger role in analyzing tweets and sharing the resulting insights with advertisers and other businesses, Twitter has acquired Gnip, its partner for the past few years.

In space, they say, no one can hear you scream. Some marketers feel the same way about Facebook.

AOL is pushing to become an elite advertising business with a new platform for buying and selling ads tied to big data.

A growing number of brick-and-mortar businesses, eager to learn more about what goes on inside their walls, are turning to new technology to gather data from people's mobile phones.

Google has acquired Nest, a company that makes a home thermostat that can be programmed from people's mobile phones, for US$3.2 billion in cash, Google said on Monday.

Pinterest, the website known for cooking recipes, sought-after shopping items and photos of who knows what, wants to better understand -- and capitalize on -- the content posted by its users.