Dialpad’s India-based research and development team leans heavily on its own cloud technology and TruCaaS approach to collaborate with remote colleagues, deliver Dialpad Meetings
Dialpad Inc., the industry leader in AI-powered communication and collaboration, recently announced a truly unified approach to communications as a service with its launch of Dialpad Meetings. Formerly known as UberConference, Dialpad Meetings adds new capabilities and establishes the Dialpad cloud communications platform as the one place for a truly unified Communications as a Service (TruCaaS) experience.
The Dialpad India team was a key contributor to the cutting-edge innovations now available in Dialpad Meetings including:
Video conferencing in HD quality for an in-the-room experience.
Real-time Voice Intelligence (Vi™) provides live note-taking and automated transcription analysis, enabling attendees to focus on the conversation and ensure key moments are not missed.
Start and join Dialpad Meetings from any direct message, group message or channel within the Dialpad app. With Dialpad Meetings natively built into the platform, users are not required to manage multiple tabs or windows.
Emoji reactions and expressions build social connections with team members and provide feedback in real-time without interruptions.
Dialpad is committed to developing hybrid work solutions for both the SMB and enterprise markets through product innovations for truly unified communications, and the company relies heavily on the research and development in India. Dialpad India is comprised of more than 80 employees throughout India working remotely and in its Bengaluru office. Dialpad is leading the hybrid work model through cloud communications by example with more than 800 employees spread across 11 offices and fully-remote teams easily collaborating on its own TruCaaS platform.
“The Dialpad spirit of connection, collaboration and productivity in this new work-from-anywhere world reflects our belief that when the right people come together — regardless of location — anything is possible,” said Amit Kaul, Vice President of Engineering and India Country Manager, Dialpad. “This project showcased the commitment to providing reliable tools to work from anywhere and we are truly proud of Dialpad India’s contribution to the successful launch of Dialpad Meetings.”
Dialpad plans to continue its India software engineering team investment with up to 50 new hires over the next 12 months. The India team will focus on Dialpad conferencing capabilities, product integrations and cloud platform infrastructure to support artificial intelligence (AI), a critical component as Dialpad expands research and development efforts for its proprietary Voice Intelligence (Vi™) technology. Vi delivers real-time business optimization, including call coaching, automated note-taking, sentiment tracking and transcription analysis to businesses of all sizes.
Exchange Solutions, a personalized loyalty solutions provider, today announced the launch of a new, modular, SaaS based offering that enhances loyalty program performance without having to replace an existing loyalty platform.
“Exchange Solutions understands that retailers want to foster better relationships with their consumers, especially those that belong to their loyalty programs. Promo Enhance gives any retailer an opportunity to do so quickly and efficiently by offering more relevant and impactful promotional experiences”
The new offering, called Promo Enhance, leverages superior promotion personalization, automation, customer experience and analytics / insights features and functionality from Exchange Solutions’ ES Loyalty product. Specifically, Promo Enhance allows retailers to:
Execute complex, highly personalized offers in minutes
Drive both transactional and engagement style behaviors
Delight members with engaging offer experiences, across all channels
Boost operational efficiency with an intuitive, self-serve SaaS console
Measure promotion performance with real-time insights
Enable through a quick and seamless integration, which works with any loyalty program
“Exchange Solutions understands that retailers want to foster better relationships with their consumers, especially those that belong to their loyalty programs. Promo Enhance gives any retailer an opportunity to do so quickly and efficiently by offering more relevant and impactful promotional experiences,” said Scott MacDonald, Vice President Product & Marketing at Exchange Solutions. “Promo Enhance is a perfect fit for retailers that need to ramp up their promotion personalization efforts but do not have the resources or hefty budget required to completely replace their existing platform, including those offered by our competitors. We commit to working with any program platform in order to help retailers maximize loyalty member spend & promotion profitability, improve member experiences and streamline promotion management. We are thrilled by the results generated to date and are excited for the opportunity to continue growing loyalty program performance on an ongoing basis.”
Exchange Solutions will be presenting an in-market case study with Harry Rosen at CRMC 2021, which begins today in Chicago. Darren Thompson, Director CRM & Loyalty at Harry Rosen shared his initial thoughts about the day-to-day momentum his team has built since implementation. “The Promo Enhance console enables our team to move quicker than traditional promotional processes or tools previously let us. I can be in a review and planning meeting at 10am and by 10:15 I’ve launched relevant, personalized offers that easily get communicated to our members in the right channels.”
International real estate group Lendlease and Google Cloud today announced a new global partnership aimed at transforming the construction and operation of buildings and cities around the world.
Working together, the two organizations will help usher in safer, more sustainable, and efficient urbanization projects globally by partnering in three key areas: advancing Lendlease’s next-generation IT strategy; integrating new artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and smart data features into Lendlease’s Podium building software platform; and collaborating on joint go-to-market initiatives to drive sustainability projects industry-wide.
Advancing Lendlease’s next-generation IT strategy Lendlease is well progressed into exiting its eight on-premise data centers across four continents by 2022, with Google Cloud as its only cloud services provider. With Google Cloud as the foundation for its digital transformation strategy, Lendlease will move to the cloud by migrating its mission-critical enterprise workloads, including its data-intense CAD platforms, in-house project excellence platform, Oli, and its Oracle-based eFinance system.
Not only will this enable Lendlease to significantly increase operational efficiency, but also it will drive improved decision making through enhanced reporting and analytics capabilities, and a stronger cybersecurity posture across the organization.
Co-developing Podium to digitize global supply chains and building lifecycles Lendlease will integrate new AI/ML and smart data analytics capabilities from Google Cloud into Podium, the Lendlease platform that runs autonomous buildings and helps manage energy use, human needs, and resource management goals.
Today, Podium relies exclusively on Google Cloud for its data storage, network, and computing needs, and firms use the platform to plan construction projects with accurate parts, pricing and supply. Under the new partnership, the two companies will collaborate on new Podium products and services to give customers the needed intelligence to improve quality and safety, as well as accelerate development pipelines.
Partnering on sustainability to benefit the industry at large The strategic partnership will also see the two organizations co-innovating around new cloud-based offerings underpinned by Podium, and working together on new sales and channel opportunities to drive Podium and Google Cloud adoption among existing customers and prospects. Ultimately this will help drive the digital transformation of the global property and real estate development industry, and give firms the advanced tools and capabilities to achieve their sustainability targets.
“Remaking buildings is both the greatest need and the greatest opportunity in addressing our future,” said Bill Ruh, CEO, Lendlease Digital. “By using Podium to digitize supply chains, firms can plan construction projects with accurate parts, pricing and supply. This means fewer delays to projects, more precise build plans, and a reduction in cost estimate errors. This will also put important information about the lifecycle of building projects into the hands of employees at their work locations, including construction sites and within owned property assets.”
Stats Perform, the sports tech leader in data and AI, announced an agreement with Borussia Dortmund which will see the Bundesliga club continue to use Stats Perform’s ISF platform to support the management of its club-wide scouting and recruitment operation for the next two years.
For over a decade, Dortmund has built a global reputation for the early identification and recruitment of some of the world’s leading young prospects, as well as providing a pathway to integrate emerging players into their first-team squad.
Now under the leadership of the club’s Head of Scouting, Markus Pilawa, Dortmund’s recruitment team, working across both first team and academy operations, will use the ISF platform to monitor leading recruitment markets globally on a day-to-day basis, as well as centrally manage all of its internal scouting intelligence on prospects.
Incorporating detailed career records for over 730,000 active players engaged in professional football worldwide, the ISF also publishes core match data for over 100,000 matches played around the world each year and houses video from key competitions. In Germany, biographical player data and line-up information is available in ISF for the top four tiers of men’s club football, in addition to six regional youth leagues going down to under 17 level.
Alongside the global database, Dortmund has had their own customised player assessment and match report templates built into their ISF system, allowing their scouting staff to subjectively assess players each week against key criteria. Within ISF, this private scouting data can be interrogated alongside each player’s objective career data, to assist with the identification of key prospects across each academy age group, the reserve team and the first-team squad.
After agreeing an extension to their ISF agreement, Borussia Dortmund’s Markus Pilawa said: “We have been working with the Stats Perform team for a long time, and during this time the ISF has been a helpful tool. The software maps various steps in our recruitment process that we have developed here in recent years. With the renewed cooperation, we look forward to a continued trustful collaboration.”
Stephan Hanke, Vice President of Sales in Europe at Stats Perform, added: “Our relationship with Borussia Dortmund’s scouting department goes back over fifteen years and I am absolutely thrilled that we will be continuing to work together for at least another two years. Stats Perform is committed to helping clubs manage strategically for the long-term and by providing Dortmund with a platform which enables them to manage both its academy and first-team scouting activity in parallel throughout the season, I believe we can help streamline key processes and provide greater clarity to major recruitment decisions, at all levels of the club.”
Digital signage and in-location experience provider Raydiant is announcing its partnership with streaming sports, games and entertainment network, Barvanna. Brick and mortars can stream Barvanna’s fast-paced sports videos, trivia questions and on-screen games on their in-location screens to entertain customers and increase dwell time and sales. This dynamic partnership brings Barvanna into Raydiant’s growing app network as a powerful customer engagement tool designed to drive revenue and repeat business.
“As a customer experience platform provider, we’ve long been aware of the overwhelming sales power of in-location entertainment,” says Bobby Marhamat, Raydiant’s CEO. “Barvanna’s high-energy streaming network is the perfect complement to Raydiant’s robust platform. This new offering gives our brick-and-mortar customers a fresh stream of dynamic and engaging entertainment that keeps customers shopping, dining, and spending money at their locations.”
Barvanna CEO Sean Riley agrees with Marhamat about the timeliness of their partnership. “We’ve had incredible feedback from our customers after implementing Barvanna. Some of our restaurant and bar customers have reported as much as a 15% increase in beverage sales! Partnering with Raydiant, a company known for creating high-impact customer experiences, just seemed like the natural next step. We’re excited to bring Barvanna to the Raydiant community, and to offer our customers the benefits of Barvanna as part of Raydiant’s comprehensive experience platform.”
Demandbase, a leading go-to market platform that is popularly known to have established several key ABM fundamentals over the years has had an interesting list of innovations and acquisitions these past few months,
Tell us about yourself Gabriel, we’d love to hear more about your journey to CEO at Demandbase!
I started my career in B2B advertising, I spent the first fourteen years selling to marketers and over that time I got really passionate about go-to market plans and how to drive demand and turn that into sales. Towards the end of this fourteen year stretch of my career, (this was in 2012!), I started getting a lot questions from our largest advertisers on what it takes to target accounts that matter as opposed to targeting everybody, they wanted to know if we can help them do that. We didn’t have that kind of capability back then in the marketplace.
Coincidentally, it’s around then that I met Chris Golec, the founder of Demandbase. He had built a powerful data set that mapped IP address to companies; this helped identify which companies were coming to a particular site.
This is what drove our conversations further and by connecting the dots, we sort of paved the way to form the basis or our ad cloud product back then.
I was Head of Sales and CRO for many years since joining Demandbase and I had the opportunity to implement ABM in our company. Then about two years ago I stepped into the CEO role right when we were hitting a 100 million dollars, it’s been an amazing journey!
2020-2021 has been an active period for Demandbase in terms of the acquisitions that were undertaken – we’d love to dive into this a little more, tell us about the story behind Engagio’s acquisition last year and your two acquisitions this May…
I’ll start with the Engagio acquisition, after becoming CEO in 2019, we noticed an interesting dynamic; there was a lot of confusion surrounding what ABM really was. That confusion was preventing people from becoming successful and the goal for me as a new CEO centered around what we can do to clarify what ABM really is to a larger market, how do we drive the right ABM best practices…
At the end of the day in ABM, it’s about the data you have on that key target account, the data on the main decision makers at those accounts… we knew what we were good at and what we wanted to do and build.
Gabe Rogol, CEO at Demandbase
Engagio had all the pieces we needed to drive this data-delivery-decision cycle and vice versa and we had an aligned version, so we went at it even though Covid hit, this was a completely remote acquisition and it turned out to be an important moment for ABM and it’s become more prominent since then.
In the least year, Covid drove digital transformation, making the whole sales and marketing process more digital-first and now companies need more to make ABM successful.
The acquisitions we undertook this May put us in a position to do more than just strengthen a brand’s ABM but also be a one-stop shop for data and sales intelligence, to provide key elements like who to reach out and what to reach out with, to help close the whole revenue loop.
That’s the key rationale behind the Engagio acquisition and this year’s InsideView and DemandMatrix acquisition.
How have these acquisitions significantly enriched the Demandbase suite of offerings and how does this now differentiate Demandbase in the marketplace?
Prior to this we were a leader in ABM and we extended that with the Engagio acquisition. Our InsideView and DemandMatrix acquisition takes ABM as a core of our solution to a part of our solution!
We are innovating how sales-marketing-revenue teams align, giving companies more data and insights to help them focus on targeting the right accounts and the people that matter within those accounts.
We’ve been a leader in B2B advertising for a long time, the acquisitions gave us two new clouds and better sales intelligence to help companies not only target accounts that matter, but to also drive the relationship they should have with those contacts, with the right messaging.
Our go-to market suite extends the marketing-sales relation to drive business. Our fourth (new!) cloud – the data cloud is incredibly important to all of this because the number one block to a successful ABM strategy is poor data. We are now one of the only companies that provide this integrated suite of capabilities.
It’s been interesting to hear about the latest innovations at Demandbase, a little change of pace here; in what ways are you seeing evolutions in today’s B2B martech environment change the game for marketers and advertisers in terms of how teams operate today and how roles are evolving?
The biggest or clearest way to think about it – martech is now moving closer to revenue. It’s about making the whole post-sales organization more effective. Martech has really been about customer and content management systems, that delivery is more on upper funnel content, and building demand and nurturing leads or nurturing broader audiences…
Martech can now boost the sales side of things, how sales is planned, what can drive conversions with other accounts while creating a circle that drives brand-demand-revenue.
Revenue platforms, CDPs, other innovations give new ways for marketing and sales to work better together. This was a lot more siloed in the past.
A lot is still evolving now in the way things are measured, the advances in revenue operations roles are turning out to be a glue, there are changes in ABM roles, and a lot of change in all this alignment is done because of tech innovations and how they can be used to solve a lot of the main problems for today’s revenue, marketing and sales teams.
How according to you will the B2B martech segment shape up to look like in the next few years?
Major categories of martech will start to consolidate but the vendors that support that will proliferate and provide add on functionalities;
I think there will be a lot more data and signals around what’s happening with your target clients, better insights on your prospects to drive opportunities and solve challenges and this will require continued development.
The future will be driven by ML and AI based applications, this was also lead to a re-emergence of attribution and measurement;
This was hot a few years ago, but the tech back then might not have been that dependable. Now as data becomes more accessible and sophisticated with AI overlays, this will re-emerge as a more powerful and reliable fundamental in marketing.
Some of the largest companies in the world rely on Demandbase to drive and maximize their B2B go-to-market performance. Demandbase is said to have pioneered the ABM category nearly a decade ago.
As the Chief Executive Officer of Demandbase, Gabe is responsible for fulfilling the company’s mission of transforming how B2B companies go-to-market. Gabe Rogol is a sales leader with a passion for scaling revenues and delivering successful programs to customers.
China’s push to curtail the monopolistic behavior of Internet companies is quickly removing barriers within the online environment. The move is expected to greatly enhance Joy Spreader is data analysis and utilization capabilities, enabling it to strengthen its algorithmic capabilities while reducing traffic costs, and to evolve from a platform to a cross-platform ecosystem, embracing greater growth opportunities.
In a move to create a level playing field for all, the essence of the anti-monopoly rules is to facilitate the creation of a fair competitive market environment, create a broad space for the development of all types of market players, especially small and medium-sized businesses, and better protect the rights and interests of consumers. Against the backdrop, Internet platform companies will need to strengthen business integration, become more open, and do away with contrived barriers. An interconnected Internet ecosystem is the one that best meets the interests of all parties.
“Joy Spreader, as an independent third party, is neither the traffic agent of any platform nor beholden to any major platform nor in any way limited to doing business with only one platform,” said one of Joy Spreader’s executives when commenting on the firm’s interim results in a conference call on August 31. “We will provide cross-platform marketing services based on our technical capabilities to facilitate integration between platforms.”
The liberalized environment opens the door to industry-wide changes. Interconnection was the original intention of the Internet, and opening up is the foundation of a digital ecosystem. The social value that can be created by the massive number of exchanges that can take place between platforms is certainly much greater than that created by limiting exchanges to within a single platform.
Interconnection between platforms will certainly bring about new bonuses. Interconnection between and opening up of platforms will result in a win-win for all parties concerned. For small and medium-sized businesses, lifting the block against external links will reduce traffic and operating costs while making it easier to run one’s business, while for consumers, the move can only help to make all online interactions, and by the same token, life, all that much more convenient.
With the opening up of the platform ecosystem, information silos are broken down, however, complications are introduced in that all the possibilities for transaction matchmaking become all the more complex, making efficiency difficult to ensure. This challenge will need to be solved by new means such as intelligence, data and algorithms, and interest-based recommendations. Joy Spreader, in its position as a leading mobile new media performance-based marketing technology company based in China, will have an historical opportunity to evolve from a platform to a cross-platform ecosystem offering many needed services.
Joy Spreader is a leading technology company in China engaged in intelligent mobile new media performance-based marketing. On the back of 10 years of experience in the internet space, the Group has become one of the few performance-based marketing technology platforms with technical innovation as its main driving force. Based on its data and algorithm capabilities, Joy Spreader uses interest-based recommendations to help customers reach consumers directly across multiple platforms including the WeChat Official Accounts Platform, WeChat Channels and Douyin. The Group has opted for a cost-per-sale (CPS) approach, choosing it as its main business model.
As of June 30, 2021, Joy Spreader covered 1.5616 million marketing points, including 657,300 on Douyin, 872,900 on the WeChat Official Accounts Platform, and 31,300 on WeChat Channels.
In addition to its domestic platform-based business, Joy Spreader is also actively expanding its e-commerce marketing business outside of China. With TikTok and similar platforms in the initial stages of monetizing their platforms, Joy Spreader’s cross-platform service capability will be significantly enhanced and the value of its marketing technology ecosystem will continue to receive more attention.
A healthy competitive environment is one that allows for participation by all interested parties and does not set any barriers in terms of who can compete. In particular, lead players should assume their role as innovators. Only innovation can bring about real social progress. The move from “walled gardens” to an “interconnected community” may be the beginning of a major shift across the entire online world.
Everise announces plans to launch a Digital Innovation Hub in Singapore and add 700 jobs in Malaysia, Japan, and Singapore by the end of the year
Everise, a US-based global customer experience company, announces plans to open a Digital CX Innovation Center in Singapore. Along with focused investments in Malaysia and Japan, Everise plans to add a total of 700 jobs by the end of the year.
Everise has experienced strong revenue CAGR growth of 33% over the last 3 years and will employ 15,000 people globally in 7 countries by the end of 2021. Everise previously operated in Malaysia and Japan in a joint-venture, but Everise exited the joint-venture on August 26, 2021 to drive the business itself.
Everise has already recruited 300 native Asian language speakers in Kuala Lumpur and Japan to support its multinational technology clients, and this will grow to 600 by the end of the year. In Japan, Everise is pioneering the work-at-home as a service model.
In Singapore, It will establish a Digital CX Innovation Center, for high-growth companies in the Southeast Asian region, as well as to service its US-based clients that wish to economically scale omnichannel customer experiences in Asia. For example, using Everise’s proprietary exage™ technology ecosystem, Everise can pair its integrated Automation and Artificial Intelligence solutions with hybrid customer support services to deliver an agile solution that optimizes both people and technology to deliver customer experiences.
“Over the past three years we have seen the opportunity to expand our services in Asia. Companies that are rapidly growing and new market entrants have demand to deliver innovative, multilingual brand experiences,” says Everise founder and CEO, Sudhir Agarwal. “We also intend to open a first-of-its-kind center for innovation for our regional clients in Singapore in the last quarter of 2021.”
Singapore is a greenfield project, and the company plans to employ 100 Singaporeans by the end of the year and 400 by the end of 2022.
Over the past two years, Everise has received a great deal of peer recognition in the form of multiple awards lauding their technology, people-first culture, and business management strategy. Founder and CEO Sudhir Agarwal has been named Executive of the Year and Outstanding Leader in several prominent awards schemes, as well as Business Insiders Top 100 People Transforming Business.
Digital marketing franchise to sponsor second highest attended agency track
Hite Digital, the first of its kind digital marketing franchise, is the official sponsor of the VIP lounge for the Traffic & Conversions Conference. The event will take place at the San Diego Convention Center from September 13th through 15th. Guest speakers will include, Grammy-Nominated Artist, Snoop Dog, and Award-Winning Chef, Martha Stewart in addition to many more.
More than 20 Hite Digital team members and franchisees will be in attendance, supporting a booth of its own and serving as the official sponsor of the VIP lounge. This year, the VIP lounge is now bigger and better than ever, hosting an exclusive meet & greet with Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart & Marie Forleo and Chip Wilson. The lounge also provides the opportunity for guests to meet and interact with decision makers, and it allows for additional private on-site meetings for those with a networking pass. This will be the first year the conference will be held in San Diego, where the venue holds the capacity to allow more attendees than ever before.
“We are incredibly honored to have the opportunity to sponsor the VIP lounge at the Traffic & Conversions Conference this year” said Hite. “This event is important to us because it allows us to connect and network with like-minded individuals in the industry, including marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs from all over the world.”
Hite Digital was conceived in 2017 by CEO and Founder, JC Hite in a two-bedroom apartment in Nicaragua. As the brand grew, Hite knew he wanted to bring something different to the table. With this thought in mind, Hite Digital became the first digital marketing firm to implement a franchise model, which utilizes a proven model of success while providing the specialized treatment of a mom-and-pop shop. What began as a team of 5 is now a team of over 100 employees and counting. The brand is growing rapidly, with more than 11 locations throughout the US and Latin America. By 2024, the brand’s goal is to increase that number to 1,000 team members in 60 locations.
Hite Digital serves as a digital marketing agency that empowers and helps businesses grow and scale. Its services include professional management solutions for PPC, SEO, and Facebook Ads campaigns, along with website designs and branding solutions. Hite Digital has invested countless hours with team members who are devoted to creating the best business solutions on the market.
Hite Digital’s franchise model is unique because it combines the four pillars of an agency to make it easier for its franchisees to operate and grow. The pillars include: Fulfillment, Systems and Operations, Prospecting, and Business Intelligence. Hite Digital will serve as each franchisee’s support system throughout their training process. The brand is only accepting 14 new franchisees per year, which is why it is so important to find the right fit that embodies each of the brand’s pillars and values. Each franchisee must be committed to helping each other in problem-solving, analyzing opportunities, and tips on increasing sales.
GR0 is proud to be Certified™ by Great Place to Work. The prestigious award is based entirely on what current employees say about their experience working at GR0. In its first year as a Certified™ workplace, 98% of employees said GR0 is a great place to work – compared to 59% at the average U.S. company.
Great Place to Work® is the global authority on workplace culture, employee experience, and the leadership behaviors proven to deliver market-leading revenue, employee retention and increased innovation.
“Great Place to Work Certification™ isn’t something that comes easily – it takes ongoing dedication to the employee experience,” said Sarah Lewis-Kulin, vice president of global recognition at Great Place to Work. “It’s the only official recognition determined by employees’ real-time reports of their company culture. Earning this designation means that GR0 is one of the best companies to work for in the country.”
According to Great Place to Work research, job seekers are 4.5 times more likely to find a great boss at a Certified great workplace. Additionally, employees at Certified workplaces are 93% more likely to look forward to coming to work, and are twice as likely to be paid fairly, earn a fair share of the company’s profits and have a fair chance at promotion.
“We are proud to have earned the 2021 Great Place to Work™ certification. Employee feedback is the single most important indicator of workplace culture, and we consider our employee experience as a top priority,” said co-founder and CEO Kevin Miller. “We owe our continued success to the dedicated team at GR0 and we thank them for this honor.”
GR0 created its core cultural norms by infusing three key company culture scaling elements throughout the entire business:
Culture Clarity & Communication – Holds together the GR0’s core vision and value system by explicitly threading them throughout our communication operating system.
Culture Design & Evolution – GR0’s desired company culture is both an organic system and the result of intentional strategic design exercises.
Culture Practices & Metrics – GR0’s Co-Founders and Senior Leadership deliberately infuse company culture into how they manage, acknowledge, coach, support, and hold employees accountable.
“At GR0, we work everyday to effectively define, cultivate, and instill a shared vision and value system that is built for and embraced by our employees within the optimal work environment,” said GR0’s Head of People Aaron Friedman. “We are thrilled to see our hard work recognized and we hope to continue to build a great place to work for our team.”
Great Place to Work® Certification™ is the most definitive “employer-of-choice” recognition that companies aspire to achieve. It is the only recognition based entirely on what employees report about their workplace experience – specifically, how consistently they experience a high-trust workplace. Great Place to Work Certification is recognized worldwide by employees and employers alike and is the global benchmark for identifying and recognizing outstanding employee experience. Every year, more than 10,000 companies across 60 countries apply to get Great Place to Work-Certified.
Unfinished Live takes place September 23-24 at The Shed, featuring high-profile speakers, immersive programming and a provocative, interactive art exhibit; open to the public
“The Future Is Decentralized” is the theme of this year’s Unfinished Live event, which will bring together technologists, entrepreneurs, changemakers and artists from around the world to imagine and create a new digital era that prioritizes people over platforms, returns the ownership and control of personal data to individuals and expands economic opportunities for internet users and developers.
This two-day convening will feature more than sixty high-profile speakers, as well as a cutting-edge, interactive art installation – named “A Project Liberty Experience” – that includes work by acclaimed media artist Refik Anadol. Unfinished Live is backed by civic entrepreneur and Project Liberty founder Frank McCourt and presented with nearly two dozen partner organizations, including the Aspen Institute, Ford Foundation, Georgetown University and PolicyLink.
“Given how today’s tech architecture is fueling misinformation, COVID vaccine hesitancy, and extreme polarization, it is urgent that we focus on this problem and find solutions,” said McCourt. “Project Liberty is about bringing people together to explore how we can harness the power of technology to create a new civic architecture for a digital world, restore trust, and ultimately build a healthier and more equitable society. We welcome everyone who shares this commitment to building a better future to join us.”
Project Liberty includes the development of a groundbreaking open-source protocol called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which will be gifted to humanity. Everyone will be able to build upon this new protocol and, by its design, the ownership and control of personal data will be shifted from companies back to individuals. In addition to this new infrastructure for the web, Project Liberty includes the establishment of the McCourt Institute, which was launched with founding partners Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris – two leading academic institutions with expertise in ethical technology – to ensure that the next generation of the internet, commonly referred to as “Web 3.0,” reflects and benefits from a values-based governance framework.
“Project Liberty, just like the Unfinished Live event, calls us to imagine the future of technology, culture and our economy,” said Angela Glover Blackwell, chair of the Unfinished Network. “More importantly, this project has the potential to help us build a thriving, multiracial democracy.”
Project Liberty will be brought to life through the “A Project Liberty Experience” art installation. This interactive, immersive art experience invites visitors to envision a world in which individuals own and control their digital data. This exhibit will be open to the public at no cost.
During Unfinished Live, Baratunde Thurston, futurist, author and host of the podcast How to Citizen, will serve as host and emcee. Featured speakers and performers include Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink and chair of the Unfinished Network; Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum; Perry Chen, founder of Kickstarter; artist Ian Cheng; TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi; Grammy award-winning producer !llmind; Gary Liu, CEO of the South Morning China Post; Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel, journalists and authors of Out of Office; Nabiha Syed, president of The Markup; Dr. Safiya Noble, author, professor and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry; media artist Refik Anadol; Frank McCourt and technologist Braxton Woodham in conversation with Axios reporter Sara Fischer; and many more.
Additional visitor experiences include live podcast recordings by Anna Sale, journalist and host of WNYC’s celebrated Death, Sex & Money podcast; Douglas Rushkoff, writer and host of the Team Human podcast; and others, as well as in-the-moment conversations with Clubhouse ambassadors.
Channel Factory ensures brands are contributing to a safer internet for Kids & Teens
Channel Factory, the global brand suitability and ad performance platform for YouTube, has been awarded the kidSAFE+ COPPA Seal, further validating Channel Factory as a trusted partner for top kids brands globally on YouTube. The kidSAFE Seal is an independent safety certification service and seal-of-approval program designed exclusively for children-friendly websites and technologies. kidSAFE reviewed Channel Factory’s targeting methodologies, technology, and data practices around children’s advertising and deemed them responsible, safe, and COPPA-compliant.
Channel Factory connects with kids and their parents in the right way on YouTube, running the right ads next to appropriate content, giving brands reassurance that they are following all applicable guidelines and restrictions. The kidSAFE certification reinforces Channel Factory’s dedication to ensure brand safety and data privacy while driving top performance, especially when it comes to kids brands like LEGO & Spin Master.
“Safety online has become one of the most important considerations for brands and marketers when they are planning campaigns — especially when it comes to children’s brands,” said Tony Chen, CEO and founder of Channel Factory. “We pride ourselves on ensuring that brands are appearing in front of the right audience and alongside the right content. That is even more crucial when dealing with kids.”
“Ensuring the safety of children online is of the utmost importance to Spin Master as a leader in children’s entertainment. We believe in working with partners and technologies that are certified to ensure the safety of children through their advertising practices. Channel Factory’s kidSAFE certification helps kids’ brands rest assured that an independent 3rd party has given their stamp of approval to the technology in use.”
Channel Factory offers a number of benefits for brands that want to reach kids and their parents online. Brands have the freedom to choose content tailored to kids and completely customize video, channel, topic and keyword campaigns for kids. Partnering with Channel Factory ensures that brands are in full compliance with regional and Google-level child privacy protection guides and are brand safe and suitable as measured by IAS and DV.
This certification comes months after Channel Factory announced The Conscious Project, fighting to create a more suitable video ecosystem. Part of creating a better digital experience online is ensuring kids are safe.
SkySail Rx technology supports contract pricing management, rebate analysis, MAC management, RFP support, ongoing claims monitoring, and dynamic claims analysis
Milliman, Inc., a premier global consulting and actuarial firm, announced the acquisition of SkySail Rx, a pharmacy benefit technology firm that specializes in leveraging data for all aspects of pharmacy benefit pricing and contract management. The addition gives Milliman’s clients a more robust platform for managing pharmacy benefits and complements the firm’s existing suite of analytic tools.
“Milliman is already the leading expert in pharmacy benefits and pharmacy data management. The addition of SkySail gives us an advanced analytic platform to support the ever-evolving needs of our clients,” says Milliman’s Global Health Practice Director, Tom Snook.
SkySail gives clients the ability to dynamically analyze large amounts of pharmacy data to drive efficiency and compliance. Given the complexity of pharmacy benefits, even a small mistake or oversight can have significant financial implications. SkySail maximizes the opportunities using a powerful analytic platform to mitigate the risk of expensive mistakes, lower costs, and help improve beneficiary pharmacy benefits experience.
“Pharmacy industry stakeholders are constantly looking for ways to reduce costs, ensure compliance, and be more efficient. By joining with an independent firm like Milliman, SkySail can enhance our unique industry approach and generate natural business synergies that provide clients with an unparalleled blend of valuable objective advice and innovative tools for managing pharmacy benefits,” says SkySail Principal, Chuck Gamsu.
DataChat, Inc., a software company that’s revolutionizing data analytics, today announced the closing of a $25 million Series A funding round led by Redline Capital and Anthos Capital. Celesta Capital (formerly WRVI Capital) and Nepthene Capital, which led the previous $4 million seed funding round, also participated.
DataChat addresses a key problem for businesses: Collecting data is easy, but making data-driven decisions is hard, especially for business users who need to act quickly to emerging trends in their data.
“Business data analytics is largely stuck in decades old processes driven by traditional business intelligence tools,” Tatiana Evtushenkova, a partner at Redline Capital, said, “Jignesh and his team have a radically different approach to democratize analytics using a novel conversational paradigm, and they have a compelling vision to dramatically transform the existing analytics ecosystem. We are delighted to have led this round.”
The key challenge for business today is how to empower their business users to self-serve complex data analytics. Today, for ad hoc analytics, these users either rely on prepared dashboards or spreadsheets to answer complex analytics questions. The power to create new, sophisticated analytics workflows using advanced methods like machine learning is simply out of the reach for these business users. DataChat empowers these users to self-serve data science by simply chatting with their all-in-one platform using controlled natural language.
“We were struck by the sheer simplicity of the solution that DataChat has built, abstracting away complex machine learning and collaboration machinery that is needed to realize the full potential in enterprise data,” noted Bryan Kelly, co-founder at Anthos Capital, “We were also impressed by the stellar DataChat team that combines world-class technology creation with a deep customer-empathic approach in everything that they do.”
DataChat describes its approach as “AI + BI = CI,” which succinctly captures their philosophy of driving analytics to the next level using their novel Conversational Intelligence (CI) approach that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to take business intelligence (BI) to the next level.
“The seed round allowed us to bring the initial product vision to market and to release it to a limited set of customers,” said DataChat CEO and co-founder Jignesh Patel, “The reception has been a huge success, and the Series A round will allow us to accelerate execution of both our product roadmap and our customer growth strategy.”
DataChat was started as a spin-out from the University of Wisconsin and continues to maintain its headquarters in Madison. DataChat also continues to receive funding from America’s Seed Fund and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), UW-Madison’s nonprofit patent and licensing organization.
In an upcoming webinar, discover the transformative economic trends across regions and new investment opportunities
As the world economy rebounds from the deep economic contraction in 2020, industrial recovery is expected to move in tandem with the global economic growth. A greater need for industrial adaptability will give rise to digitization and innovative business models such as automotive subscription services. International vaccination efforts, an improved employment outlook, and buoyed consumer confidence bode well for global growth recovery in 2021 and 2022. However, the recent spread of the Delta variant and the renewal of regional mobility restrictions will hamper the pace of recovery, with potential spill-over effects into early 2022.
Join Frost & Sullivan experts Aroop Zutshi, Global President; Neha Anna Thomas, Senior Economist; and Craig Parker, Research Director, for the upcoming Growth Opportunity briefing, “Top 10 Global Economic Trends for 2021 and 2022,” on September 15 at 11 a.m. EDT and September 16 at 12 p.m. SGT. Discover how the 2022 economic growth outlook is set to evolve globally and potential factors impacting businesses. In addition, understand the emerging regional and industry-specific growth opportunities that companies can leverage.
Identify the key transformative trends driving the automotive, healthcare, energy, information and communications technology, travel and tourism, and construction industries.
Discover critical regional developments and risks to global economic growth in light of the emerging geopolitical disruptions.
Explore the regional and industry-specific growth opportunities created by the global shift toward sustainability and digitization.
Uncover how growth forecasts for major economies will evolve.
Integrated Solution Empowers Enterprises to Accelerate Growth and Build Lasting Customer Bonds Through Value-based Engagement Leveraging First-party Data
Annex Cloud, a global, enterprise technical solutions provider of advanced loyalty management solutions and experiential customer retention software, today announced a partnership with VTEX, the enterprise digital commerce platform for premier brands and retailers, to enable enterprises to deliver personalized, omnichannel customer experiences at scale—increasing customer lifetime value, improving retention and building emotional customer bonds that last.
The acceleration of digital transformation has brought fierce competition, making it more challenging for enterprises to stand out and retain customers. Enterprises are also scrambling to find better ways to collect customer data, acquire new customers, and deliver a truly omnichannel customer experience. The Aberdeen Group reports companies with extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement retain 89% of their customers on average. Loyalty has become a business-critical growth strategy and can help enterprises address many of these challenges.
Annex Cloud’s Loyalty Experience Platform™, combined with VTEX’s Digital Commerce Platform, enables brands to go to market faster, innovate and pivot more easily, identify growth opportunities, optimize operations, serve up individualized interactions across the buyer’s journey, engage customers across preferred channels, add meaningful value between transactions, identify and reward their best customers, drive repeat sales, reduce churn, and build lasting customer bonds.
“The digital transformation has given global organizations a unique opportunity to move beyond transaction-based marketing and move to a data-led strategy, enabling them to create relevant one-to-one experiences that deliver real value,” said Al Lalani, CEO, Annex Cloud. “Together with VTEX, we’re creating a mutual value exchange that demonstrates to customers that the brand is using their data to improve their experience, while helping the brand stand out, protect margins, and accelerate growth. We are pleased to welcome VTEX as a partner.”
“Speed to market through digital commerce, clear differentiation and being able to identify and focus on your best customers is critical for global organizations to maintain a competitive edge,” says Amit Shah, Chief Strategy Officer and U.S. General Manager , VTEX. “With VTEX and Annex Cloud, organizations can transform their business and sustain profitability by creating digital experiences that resonate with their customers, across their buying journeys.”
Loyalty Experience Platform—An Enterprise Customer Retention Solution that Accelerates Growth
Annex Cloud’s Loyalty Experience Platform is the only full-suite loyalty solution that allows organizations to buy just what they need, meaning they can start with a simple value exchange and collect first-party data, then add on more sophisticated omnichannel reward and program types as they grow.
Modularity: The widest range of engagement modules to build attitudinal, emotional, and empathic connections. Extensible platform allows flexibility and a nimble delivery environment to meet ever changing needs.
Comprehensive Engagement Suite: Brands can capture, recognize, and reward all customer actions with referrals, gamification, UGC/survey, influencer management, and contests.
100+ pre-built integrations: Pre-built integrations with more than 100 market-leading technologies strategically architected to accelerate the delivery of loyalty management programs and meaningful customer experiences.
Leading data and research firm for investors and venture capitalists includes Auryc as an emerging startup with unicorn growth potential.
Auryc, the leading customer experience intelligence platform for quantifying the true impact of digital friction and frustration across mobile and web, announced that the company has been included in the Top Vertical Business Intelligence 2021 list of most promising startups from Tracxn, the data and research firm for investors and venture capitalists.
According to Tracxion, Vertical Business Intelligence is one of the most active sectors for investors, with overall funding of $20 billion. Tracxn named Auryc among a limited set of early-stage ventures (Series A+) poised for accelerated high growth destined for Unicorn status.
“The ever-increasing share of the digital economy and consumers’ demand on experiences (Millennials, Gen Z) requires every business under the sun to invest in customer experience and the digital journey,” stated Auryc CEO and co-founder, Jinlin Wang. “It is a huge problem to solve for any vendor in the space, and we are still in the first inning. Auryc is committed to bringing continuous innovations to its best-of-breed SaaS platform to enable optimal digital experiences for B2C and B2B brands like Cole Haan, Party City, Cox Automotive, Aura, 4Ocean, and Apple Leisure Group.”
Auryc’s inclusion in this selective list recognizes Auryc’s team and technology as it continues to innovate how companies approach building better digital customer experiences through a unique combination of behavior analytics, session replay, voice of the customer, and AI-powered prescriptive and predictive intelligence. Auryc’s platform powers optimal experiences across dozens of industries, including travel, retail, automotive, consumer services, finance, and SaaS.
Vertical Business Intelligence companies offer industry-specific business intelligence/analytics solutions for other organizations. These intelligence platforms provide services in specific industries such as Retail, Travel, Healthcare, and Financial Services.
Tracxn’s Emerging Startup Series is a segmented list of “unicorn” companies with more than $1 billion in valuation. The list also includes the most notable startups poised to reach Unicorn status soon (“Soonicorns”) and early-stage companies on a long-term path to Unicorn status (“Minicorns”). Tracxn assesses candidates for its list using publicly available information and analysis of likely company performance in each sector. Companies are selected based on criteria such as market size, marquee investors, execution, and growth prospects.
T-Pain backed app secures $4MM seed; combines simple song creation tools with passionate community
mayk.it allows anyone to become a musician. The free app provides a personal recording studio for its users, instantly equipping people with access to professional-quality voice filters, produced beats, lyrical & visual inspiration tools, in-app distribution, audience, and community on-demand. Anyone on mayk.it can easily produce, own, and share their music exclusively through a mobile device.
Founded by TikTok, Snap, and Google alums, mayk.it is working to connect users to simple music creation tools, a medium that is less represented in favor of photo and video-focused mediums. Breaking down barriers to music creation will allow people to comfortably and effortlessly express themselves through song and sound. Now, music content is depressurized and democratized.
The platform harnesses three core fundamentals in technology and product to effectively enable their users to begin their musical journey. Users will enjoy easy access to quality tools that are accessible in a collaborative medium. Once a user chooses a voice filter and a beat, they can begin creating and sharing songs in a matter of seconds.
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, co-founders Stefan Heinrich Henriquez and Akiva Bamberger wanted to create music, but realized creative spaces with beginner-oriented tools did not exist. Their mission: build a platform that would be easy enough for anyone to use, but sophisticated enough to support aspiring artists and create streaming quality sounds. To achieve this, they combined studio-grade audio production tools in a simple design interface.
“mayk.it is so close to my heart,” says Stefan Heinrich Henriquez, mayk.it’s CEO. “Making songs is a great equalizer inaccessible to most. We all have a voice – and with access to free pro tools – anyone can experience music as a liberating creative outlet. I hope our new creative tool inspires more people to connect via personalized songs.”
Akiva Bamberger, mayk.it’s CTO, continued, “So many aspiring artists with musical dreams stop producing due to the frustration of traditional audio software tools. Focusing on the beginner and creating the most fun, fastest, and easiest way to make songs, is really important to allow more potential artists to express themselves.”
mayk.it secured $4 Million in funding from notable investors including: Greycroft, Chicago Ventures, Slow Ventures, firstminute, as well as Steven Galanis, Randi Zuckerberg, YouTuber Mr. Beasts’ Night media, Spotify’s 1st CMO Sophia Bendz, Cyan Banister, Artist T-Pain and Music Industry Veteran Zach Katz, among others.
Greycroft’s Dana Settle added, “I believe that all humans are fundamentally creative – I watch my kids expressing themselves creatively in building (Minecraft/Roblox), photos (Instagram), videos (TikTok) and now with sound & music (mayk.it)! It’s exciting to be involved with such a diverse and incredible team building the platform for the next frontier of creativity.”
Artist T-Pain, shares, “It was really hard and crazy expensive, when I had to find a way to make my sound in music. I’m mega excited that now others can have a fast and free way to tune their voice, find their sound, and be comfortable discovering their musical journey.”
mayk.it will be a tool to connect talented, unrecognized musical creators to industry professionals, songwriters and producers. Major record label A&R producer Mickey ‘Memphitz’ Wright Jr. explained, “I think mayk.it is the next fun & creative way for me to find the next best-known-unknown future stars for our record label. On this app, users could make a hit without even trying.”
Manu, a content creator with 15M followers, was an early beta tester. Of the user experience, Manu said, “mayk.it allowed me to truly be a 360-content creator as I can now make & own my own songs for my videos – this is unleashing even more creativity for me as I have full creative control over the songs I’m making for my content. I never thought I could sing or create my own comedy audio roster but with the right tools, literally everyone can sing now.”
Millions of creators can add Rares to their Link In Bios to monetize exclusive content and more deeply engage their audiences
YouTube sensation Piper Rockelle, whose videos have amassed almost 2 billion views, today announced the launch of a new creator economy app, Rares, on Koji, the leading app store for social media creators. Rares allows creators to promote and monetize exclusive content while creating fun challenges to increase their followers’ engagement directly on their link in bio across all social media services.
Creators make a “Rare” by choosing a photo or video and then hiding it with pixelation, stickers, and text. Then, fans unlock that content by entering a password, paying money, or answering a quiz question, depending on how the creator has configured the app. These unlock mechanisms have endless potential to encourage more interaction, streams, views, watch time, etc., on that creator’s existing content.
“When I first started making Rares, I was doing it by hand. I’d blur images in Photoshop and then add all of the stickers and text on Instagram. It was definitely a time-intensive process, but my fans really love it, so I kept making them. Having my own app where I can do that all in one place makes things so much easier, and I’m excited that other creators can now start making their own Rares too,” said Rockelle.
“Social media creators have developed all kinds of bespoke workflows to create and publish their content. The natural next step is for creators to ‘app-ify’ those workflows to dramatically reduce the time and effort required to get things done, not only for themselves but for millions of other creators. It’s inspiring to see a young, visionary creator like Piper develop new tools and bring them to market for the next generation of creators,” said Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of Koji.
Building on its long history of delivering cutting edge AR light engines, Avegant announced its latest products — the AG-30L 30º and AG-50L 50º LED light engines. Avegant’s 30º AR light engine uses proprietary illumination technology to dramatically reduce engine volume and weight while preserving efficiency and MTF. The next generation Avegant light engine, the AG-50L, enables a larger field of view and a more immersive AR experience for users while maintaining the compact, light glasses form factor made possible by the AG-30L product.
To date, AR companies have struggled with creating beautiful and stylish products while maintaining performance and manufacturability. The AG-30L and AG-50L addresses these challenges through Avegant’s proprietary, unique optical and illumination technologies to deliver high performance in a manufacturable way. The combination of these features will enable the creation of a new generation of AR glasses with an ultra-compact form factor.
A limited supply of engineering samples of Avegant’s AG-30L light engine will be available in late 2021. Engineering samples of Avegant’s AG-50L light engine will be available in early 2022. Mass production is anticipated to begin in 2023.
Ed Tang, CEO of Avegant, said, “Our customers have been asking us to help them enable true AR glasses for their consumers. The key to reducing weight and volume sufficiently to reach the glasses form factor is innovation in light engine technologies. Our new illumination architectures and optical designs dramatically reduce the size of LED light engines for AR. With these new light engines, we solve our customers’ biggest challenges in delivering a smaller, glasses form factor in a manufacturable way. We’ve seen considerable excitement in the industry around our unique light engines because they are significantly lighter, smaller, and perform to our customers’ specifications in efficiency, resolution, and contrast.”
Some of the largest companies in the world rely on Demandbase to drive and maximize their B2B go-to-market performance. Demandbase is said to have pioneered the ABM category nearly a decade ago.
