How do you make sense of 2,000+ marketing tech companies?

This week on What to Think, we speak to John Koetsier, the vice president of research at VB Insight, VentureBeat’s new market-research arm.

VB Insight is taking a very data-driven approach to research. Case in point: For its latest report on social media management tools, VB Insight surveyed over 1,100 social media managers, analyzed a quarter-million tweets sent by 1,600 companies, and considered almost 200 different social media tools, ultimately doing detailed analysis of 28 leading tools.

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That’s a valuable asset in the marketing tech world, which has a huge number of players — over 2,000 at last count — and attracted over $3 billion in venture investment in the last quarter alone. In other words, it’s a market with a lot of complexity and a lot of hype.

We talk to John about the value of marketing technologies, what marketing clouds are standing out, what the current trends are, and about the inevitable wave of consolidation that’s coming.

Plus, we tell you what to think about:

• Google unveils ultra low-cost Project Fi wireless service with pay-as-you-go data rate
• Facebook’s secret plan to kill Google — and become the second trillion-dollar company in the process
• Amazon Web Services is now a $5B business

All this and more is in our latest weekly episode. Give it a listen!

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Enjoy the show!