Facebook has moved its ad-tech platform Atlas out of its ad tech group and into its measurement division, according to a Business Insider report. What this means is that Atlas now sits in Facebook's "marketing sciences" group, which is run by Brad Smallwood, the company's vice president of measurement and insights. "The ad tech division, which contains the lucrative Facebook Audience Network, will continue to be run by Brian Boland, Facebook's VP of ad tech. David Jakubowski, who was running Atlas, will also remain in Boland's team. The rest of Atlas will now work under Smallwood." The shift reflects a …

Facebook's planning an ad campaign, including TV ads and billboards, to encourage more of its 1.7 billion users to stream live video on the social network, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Facebook Live, which debuted in April, is being used by publishers and public figures, "some of whom are paid millions of dollars by Facebook to produce a specified number of live videos every month. With this ad campaign, Facebook hopes to win over ordinary users, who don’t live-stream as often," people familiar with the effort told the Journal.

In an interview with eMarkteter's Maria Minsker, LinkedIn's Russell Glass, head of products for LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions unit, said LinkedIn's recent decision to introduce programmatic display advertising was driven by marketers' needs and the goals of achieving scale and greater efficiency. He told eMarketer that more than 70% of display ad buys are happening via programmatic buying. Further, The vast majority of our advertisers asked us to provide them with an ad-buying channel that is more congruent with how they’re buying ads elsewhere. In the past, we offered a manual, insertion order-based, guaranteed-display …

Ad tech firm AppNexus just raised $31 million in fresh funding from News Corp., Yahoo Japan, and other investors. “The fact that two major publishers are the lead investors is likely a signal of intent towards AppNexus -- and potentially away from the dominant publisher ad tech platform Google DoubleClick,” Business Insider notes.

Algorithms, the cloud, the internet of things, and data — a combination referred to as ACID — are changing the face of computing, according to Microsoft corporate VP Joseph Sirosh at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta. "Sirosh showed numerous ACID offerings from both Microsoft and other firms during a session titled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of ACID.' That title seemed to be a double pun: on the book 'The Unreasonable Lightness of Being' and on the acronym 'ACID.' The acronym for some 30 years has referred to one of the fundamental principles of relational databases, a longtime IT tool. It stands for 'atomicity, consistency, isolation …

San Francisco-based mobile ad-tech firm AppLovin will sell a majority stake to a Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital for $1.42 billion, according to a report in Fortune. The deal is expected to close before year end. The company's technology revolves around mobile monetization and retargeting and it's also an ad network that helps advertisers leverage existing user data in order to reach, engage, and convert similar users. Once it acquires a user, AppLovin continues to track that person for the purposes of retargeting and retention.

Digital Content Next, digital marketing trade body, is launching an automated online ad marketplace called TrustX, in a bid to bring more transparency to online advertising, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. "The ad marketplace, or 'ad exchange,' will allow marketers to buy ad space across properties owned by 25 media companies, including ABC, Condé Nast, Hearst, NBCUniversal, the Washington Post, Meredith, ESPN, Vox Media and News Corp. which owns The Wall Street Journal...The marketplace will function as a non-profit subsidiary of DCN and is designed to help restore some transparency to the increasingly complicated online advertising …

Instagram has 500,000 advertisers, more than double the number it had in February, the Facebook-owned company reported. Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion four years ago and launched an ad program in September, Fortune reported. "The fast rise shows a strong momentum with advertisers that want to reach its 500 million monthly active users. Instagram’s advertiser numbers, however, are still far cry from that of Facebook, which is estimated to have 2 million advertisers. But Instagram has already surpassed other, older social media sites like Twitter, which has just over 100,000 advertisers. Instagram’s COO Marne Levine said that …

Apple snapped up machine learning company Tuplejump; the terms of the deal were not disclosed. Apple bought Perceptio at the end of 2015 and Turi a few months ago, according to TechCrunch.

The Trade Desk issued almost 4.7 million shares at $18 apiece, raising $84 million for its IPO, according to the Wall Street Journal. "During the first day of trading on the Nasdaq on Wednesday, the stock (which trades under the ticker “TTD”) jumped 67% to $30.10," the Journal reported. "Founded in 2009, the Trade Desk provides software designed to help advertisers and their agencies buy ads using automated tools and reams of data. The company’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Green, acknowledged that given the rocky climate for ad tech IPOs over the past several years, the firm and Wall …