Bluewater Media Hires Sandy Goldman as New President of Zahalo

Sales Funnels Shouldn’t Take Vacations: How to Take Advantage of the “Slow” B2B Summer Season

Unless you sell industrial air conditioners, there’s a good chance that summer is looked at as a sleepy sales season in your B2B industry.

Summer is downtime. Summer is vacation. Summer is employees with kids struggling with childcare arrangements in the gap left between school and camp. Do your business customers really have the head to be focused on making major product or service purchases?

But let’s take a look at two major reasons as to why summertime often stays an active time for B2B. Then we’ll discuss strategy and tools to manage the summer season so that you can take a vacation without letting profits slip through your fingers.

The City Never Relaxes

Oh, sleeping we can still do. When we’re asleep, we’re off the grid. Period.

Not so when we’re “relaxing.”

When we’re enjoying time “off”, often our devices butt in. They come along on our vacations as guests and remind us that it would be a good idea if we retained some handle on what was going on at work.

Your average B2B client will come back from the tennis court or the pool, freshen up, sit down with an ice coffee… and her device. And if she’s in the market for a product or service like yours, there’s a good chance that some of your content is going to end up on her device screen, since she’s been putting off research and suddenly has time.

Even during the heart of vacation season, you have to assume that most of your audience is at least semi-active.

Also Read: Top 10 Takeaways From The Mary Meeker 2018 Internet Trends Report

When is the “summer season,” again?

We all know that our colleagues on the other side of the Equator have a summer season that overlaps with the holiday season. When we’re “summering” in the USA, Europe, Asia or North Africa, businesses in Australia, South Africa and Southern South America are hard at work.

Even within one hemisphere, you’re still going to get variation from country to country when it comes to school summer vacation. In the USA, school vacation stretches for 10 weeks – from late May to early August or from late June to early September. In Singapore, it’s only four weeks – from late May to late June. The UK vacations from mid-July to early September.

Check out the variation in summer vacation length in Europe alone!

So before you let down your guard, check the vacations in the areas where your clients concentrate. You may be in a vacation-mindset – but are they?

Vacation-mindset also varies by culture. Americans tend to push themselves to work more even at the expense of vacation, relaxation and recharging, leading some employers to actually pay their employees to take their vacation days and use them as – surprise! A vacation!

Swedes and other Europeans don’t seem to have that hangup. They guard their 5 weeks paid vacation and throw themselves into it and out of work with gusto

So you can’t write off summer as a “dead season” when it comes to B2B. Does that mean YOU can’t take vacation? How do you manage both?

Also Read: How to Evoke ‘Analog’ Emotions Using Digital Technology

Lather, Rinse, Automate

Think of your marketing and sales funnel like a child. When your kids get old enough, it becomes feasible to go on vacation and leave them behind.

The more you can get your marketing and sales system to run independently of your management, the more you’ll be able to detach when you’re on vacation. It’s doing its thing, and you can do yours.

Plan and set up your fall campaigns in advance. Get the supporting content, social media and sales funnel ready so you can press GO before you leave on your vacation with a clean conscience. Oktopost is a great tool for B2B social engagement, campaign management and advance scheduling.

A marketing automation tool can be invaluable here, although you may need to check in from time to time to evaluate and optimize. Autonomous (self-optimizing) marketing tools, like CliClap, can do even more with even less management.

A self-optimizing tool is like an incredibly mature adolescent (do those exist?). You’ll be perfectly relaxed on your vacation, knowing your home is being well taken care of by your responsible teenager, and you’ll return to a well-stocked fridge, fresh sheets on your bed and dinner in the oven.

While the incredibly mature adolescent may be a fantasy, the self-optimizing marketing tool is not. Get it set up far enough in advance that you’ll be able to have peace of mind during your vacation, and come back to a bunch of new clients and a full list of new leads.

Don’t Drop the Ball

If your closing a client is any more complicated than a SaaS free trial, you can’t rely on your automated marketing alone. At some point a human will need to be involved.

If the humans in your company are taking vacations, set up a clear plan of who will be responsible for incoming leads and when. The ubiquitous Slack is a natural at keeping your team coordinated. Or you might want to spring for tools designed expressly for sales team coordination, such as DealHub or Enspark.

Ensure that your sales funnel is always covered by at least one individual, even if it means that they just make contact to say that the person to speak to it on vacation and give a timeframe within which the inquiry can expect a follow-up.

Also Read: Pinterest Expands Pinterest Marketing Partners Program With Creative Specialty

Good Housekeeping

Sometimes business really does slow down. If that happens to you, and you’re not leaving on vacation just yet, jump on this opportunity to take stock of your business assets and processes.

Drawing a blank? Here’s an action plan for you:

Revisit lead scoring

Even if you have a well-designed scoring model based on behavioral data, the actual funnel data you’ve collected since then can help you refine your model and make more accurate measures and predictions of lead readiness.

Here’s how to do it:

Find all the opportunities won that came in some way through marketing.
See if you can find some common behaviors in (e.g. what referring sources, which pages and content they visited, what actions they took on your site).
When you find common behaviors, give those behaviors more weight in your scoring models and/or set up special nurturing campaigns specifically for these leads.

You might also want to look into advanced lead scoring and management solutions like Leadspace and Lattice Engine, both of which use artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies to scale your lead generation and sales.

Updated lead scoring model? Check! Onward to the database!

Database cleanup

For many of us, the thought of sorting through the hundreds, thousands or more records in our database is overwhelming.

But letting those records accumulate unchecked could be costly. You end up paying your Marketing Automation provider or CRM for records that are no longer relevant. Your contacts change email addresses, and emails bounce and bring your sender score down.

Here’s how to fix the situation:

Evaluate all non-customer entities that haven’t engaged with you (didn’t open emails, visit your site, attend an event etc.) in the past 4-6 months. Delete records for which there is no reasonable hope for future engagement and conversion.
De-dupe contact records. This is especially likely if you have multiple employees and you don’t have a standardized way in which to enter records, leaving the path wide open for several records for the same entity.
Make sure your data is valid and you aren’t missing critical bits of records.

Also Read: FlipMyFunnel 2018 Conference to Return to Boston

Website maintenance

There is so much to do in order to improve the website performance, and some activities require external assistance. Here are some basic checks you can perform to catch that “low-hanging fruit.”

Look in Google Analytics for pages with high bounce rates and/or low conversions. Think about what you could add to or change in those pages (the content itself, CTAs, recommended resources) that could help your visitors continue their journey on your site.
Identify 404 pages and delete them or fix the URL.

Content analysis

Content marketing success is rarely achieved through “set and forget.” It is key to measure what each piece of content is bringing you and planning how to leverage it better in the future.

With Google Analytics, you can build a dashboard that will let you see your content performance at a glance. Make sure you have goals defined within Analytics so that you can track the contribution of each content asset to conversions.

For visual evidence of your content’s performance, use Google’s Page Analytics Chrome Extension. View a page of your site when signed into your Analytics account and you’ll see an overlay with metrics for the page as well as click data for each of the links on the page.

Heatmaps can also provide clarity on how visitors interact with your content. Hotjar is a great tool for heatmaps and other visitor insight tools, and they offer both a forever free (but limited) plan and free trials for their other plans.

If some of your content resources are PDFs, we feel your pain. The fact that you lost the visitor trail once they entered a PDF drove us crazy for eons. It was a source of great satisfaction when we added to CliClap the functionality of following visitor engagement and interaction within a PDF. If PDFs are an important part of your content strategy, implement a solution that will help you track and optimize your PDFs.

Make Like a Swede and… Vacation!

The most important asset your company has is not a piece of content; it’s you. Give yourself regular maintenance. Take time to develop and upgrade yourself on the personal level.

It’s true; you don’t want to be too laid back about the summer or you’ll let potential clients and buyers slip through your fingers. Devices and mindset often keep B2B clients connected and thinking about work even when they’re on vacation. In addition, “summer vacation” encompasses such a wide range of time that inevitably a segment of your clients will be working hard during your “vacation season”.

Put in responsible preparation efforts. Automate, delegate and coordinate. Take advantage of pre-vacation time to do some housekeeping in your lead scoring, databases, website maintenance, content and other areas

Then let go! You deserve it.

Recommended Read: Is Your Facebook Engagement Working For You?

Captiv8 Launches Free AI-powered Creator Discovery

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July 6, 2018

Captiv8 Launches Free AI Powered Creator Discovery

With Creator Discovery, Captiv8 Becomes the First Platform to Democratize Identification and Access to Creators

Captiv8, the largest AI-powered branded content platform, announced they are the first platform to offer free, full-access creator discovery for brands.

Branded content is disrupting the $90B television and video advertising market yet identifying creators that will resonate the most for a brand is still a major pain point. Discovering creators that will drive the highest brand affinity for an audience is time-consuming and expensive. To date, brands have conducted over 25M searches to find creators but until now, there was no platform that indexed creators and gave brands access to leverage that data, at no cost. Captiv8’s customers spend on average 2 hours per day within creator Discovery saving them over 60% of the time it previously took to find creators.

Captiv8, Free AI Powered Creator Discovery — *Captiv8, Free AI-powered Creator Discovery*

Captiv8’s AI-powered branded content platform gives brands the ability to search for the right creator by leveraging over 50+ different criteria, including personality archetypes, ethnicity, brand affinity, age, gender and HHI. Over 1 million creators across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Podcasts, Twitch, Musical.ly and LinkedIn are indexed on the platform, with more being added every day. Captiv8 has built a proprietary machine learning stack on top of IBM Watson, Google Cloud Compute, and Amazon Web Services, which make it the platform of choice for tier 1 brands, ad agencies, PR agencies and talent agencies.

Also Read: Captiv8 Hires Lynn D’Alessandro As Head Of Global Sales

“The Captiv8 Discovery platform has amazing and rich data about individual creators that makes evaluating potential partners much easier and well-informed. What used to be an extremely manual process, is completely data-driven with more certainty than ever before,” said Kerry Perse, Head of Social for OMD.

Krishna Subramanian

“Discovering creators should be scalable, effective, and free. Today we are pulling down the paywalls and allowing everyone to access our Discovery platform, as the default starting point for every piece of branded content,” said Krishna Subramanian, Co-Founder of Captiv8. “What Google did for websites, Captiv8 is doing for Creators.”

Discovery is a part of Captiv8’s full stack self-serve platform, that includes social listening, campaign management/workflow and measurement, used by brands like Dr Pepper Snapple Group, StubHub, Honda, and many more. Premium features, such as additional audience and psychographic data as well as access to the entire platform, are available for customers.

Cannes Lions 2018 Opens Up New Horizon for Immersive Content and Native Advertising

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July 6, 2018

Q&A WITH MARTECH SERIES: SIMPLI.FI’S CEO SHARES KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM CANNES LIONS 2018

Cannes Lions 2018 Opens Up New Horizon for Immersive Content and Native Advertising

After Attending Cannes Lions 2018, Jeff Lucas of Oath Spoke to Us About the Key Takeaways from the Global Event for Digital Advertising

Cannes Lions 2018 remains the most followed event at MarTech Series. We chose to talk more this time with industry leaders at Cannes Lions and dive deeper into the realm of digital advertising. We spoke to Oath’s new Head of Americas Sales & Global Teams, Jeff Lucas, who was there. He talks extensively about brand safety, “XR” ads and native.

Brand safety still the topic du jour

Whether you’re in the French Riviera or on Madison Avenue, brand safety is still the big, burning issue among advertisers. In fact, we polled more than 300 digital ad execs heading into Cannes to get their take on brand safety and nearly 60 percent said that they’re more worried about it this year than last year.

Improvements are happening — particularly among ad tech vendors — but marketers are still being burned by social media platforms. As a result, a lot of brands at Cannes are talking about shifting their spend to more premium and controlled media environments. I expect that trend to continue over the next 12 months.

More innovation in XR formats: programmatic VR & 3D Ads

The buyers I spoke to at Cannes are eager to invest in more interactive formats, like programmatic VR and 3D ads. 70 percent of all media consumption happens on mobile. But that rapid growth has had a sizable impact on consumer expectations. It has raised the bar for engaging ad experiences across screens.

To take advantage of the surging brand and consumer demand, technology providers and media partners need to develop unique new formats and inventory. Extended reality (XR) campaigns are especially promising. This can range from programmatic VR to 3D and 360-degree video. With 5G on the horizon and investments to make the creative process a lighter lift, these types of ad experiences will be even more effective and scalable.

Native ad spend is going to increase

Native advertising was a hot topic at Cannes. Native is not new, obviously. But its popularity, as a format, continues to surge among advertisers and consumers alike. Among buyers, native ads will account for 60 percent of all digital display spend this year. Marketers are relying on native more and more because it builds trust and drives engagement with end-users. Native is especially important for mobile, as the preference for more engaging and innovative formats has increased among consumers.

Brands like Caltex, Crowne Plaza and Macy’s are among those innovating with native and connecting with customers in new and engaging ways.

Thank you, Jeff, for speaking to us about your experience at Cannes Lions 2018!

SolarWinds MSP Launches MSP Institute—A Business Playbook Providing MSPs with Support Through Business and Technical Training

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July 6, 2018

SolarWinds MSP Launches MSP Institute—A Business Playbook Providing MSPs with Support Through Business and Technical Training

SolarWinds MSP, a global leader in delivering comprehensive, scalable IT service management solutions to IT solution providers and MSPs, has today launched its MSP Institute, a playbook for MSPs designed to provide training and tips through business, sales, marketing, and technical tracks from experts and industry leaders.

The MSP Institute consists of webinars, videos, and podcasts—with tracks on go-to-market strategies, advice on how to build and manage a successful sales team, best practices for operational success, and tips on how to manage customer relationships successfully. The MSP Institute will have five series throughout 2018, including:

Also Read: Verasity and TRUTH Agency Wage War on Digital Ad-Fraud

The Management Series – focusing on foundational business practices for owners and managers, covering topics including how to choose your program portfolio, pricing strategies to enhance profitability, building a foundational sales and marketing plan, the benefits and pitfalls of NOCs and help desks, and metrics that can help you improve your business
The Sales Series – covering the fundamentals of selling, value propositions, customer-acquisition strategies, moving prospects through the process to becoming full customers, and techniques for handling objections
The Marketing Series – teaching high-quality, high-yield inbound marketing techniques, how to build a brand, lead generation methods, media planning and content marketing, funnel management, and the content/collateral creation process
The Security Series – featuring tips on how to leverage security as a key business driver, how to create a security offering, the fundamentals of regulatory compliance, and educating your customers on better security practices
The Backup Series – coaching how to position backup services (and what you’re really selling to customers), how to define backup services and scope, outlining service level agreements and setting pricing, and how to get more backup business without relying on selling

“We are excited to bring the MSP Institute to the market as we continue to build on our track record of providing valuable training to our customers since 2004—our mission is to support and empower our partners to be highly successful and confident in their business,” said Mike Cullen, vice president, customer experience and business strategy, SolarWinds MSP. “The MSP Institute portal is intended to be well-suited for most MSPs, at varying stages in their business life-cycle, and offers robust training materials across the entire business spectrum from some of the industry’s top experts.”

MapR Unveils Major Data Platform Update for AI and Analytics

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July 6, 2018

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MapR Unveils Major Data Platform Update for AI and Analytics

Leading Platform Lowers TCO and Integrates Storage and Security Across On-Premises, Edge and Cloud Deployments

MapR Technologies, Inc., the industry’s leading data platform for AI and Analytics, announced a series of breakthrough MapR Data Platform advances to speed the operational impact of automated analytics, improve the productivity of developers and data scientists, lower TCO, and streamline security and storage across on-premises data centers, clouds and edge deployments.

.@MapR Unveils Major Platform Update for AI and Analytics, Lowering TCO and streamlining Security Across On-Premises, Edge and Cloud Deployments #AI #ML

Anoop Dawar

“Customers have made it clear that traditional approaches to managing and processing data for AI and Analytics leave critical gaps. In response, MapR’s newest innovations enable data scientists and developers to power distributed AI and analytics by leveraging all data for more impactful results,” said Anoop Dawar, senior vice president product management and marketing, MapR. “The continual evolution of the MapR platform is evident in this rich release of new capabilities, built in close collaboration with leading customers, to provide a multi-temperature, multi-protocol on-prem, edge and cloud data platform.”

Also Read: AI-as-a-Service in Martech: Focus on Virtual Assistants, Voice Search, and Location Data Intelligence

Larry Mieldezis

“Integration and data management are at the heart of our advanced Liaison ALLOY Platform which is designed to solve complex business problems for large global enterprises in healthcare, financial services and other industries. The MapR Data Platform is fundamental to ALLOY’s ability to enable a seamless flow of data securely and at scale for our customers,” said Larry Mieldezis, CIO, Liaison Technologies. “We look forward to the new AI and Analytics capabilities which will provide exciting new advancements to our customers while significantly simplifying security and storage requirements for our ALLOY Platform.”

The major platform update from MapR includes key areas of innovation that for the first time extend the data fabric to cloud storage through object tiering; fast ingest erasure coding for more cost-effective, long-term data retention; security innovations to automatically enable security across the environment, a new S3 API supporting next-gen applications and increasing application portability; and an wide array of analytical and real-time streaming enhancements.

A recent Gartner research note states the need for a new approach citing that “Data growth has far outstripped compute growth, resulting in an imbalance in system architectures. Emerging data-intensive workloads that require data-centric processing — such as AI, high-performance computing (HPC) and IoT — will expose the system imbalance, especially in data movement, resulting in new architectural innovations to address this gap.”

Also Read: AI Breakthrough Announces Inaugural Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Award Winners

New Breakthrough Capabilities

New benefits from the added features and updates of the MapR Platform include:

Core Data Service Innovations to Speed AI & Analytics and lower TCO

Policy-Driven automatic data placement across performance-optimized, capacity-optimized and cost-optimized tiers, on-premises or in cloud, with Object Tiering,
Fast ingest erasure coding that can now be used for capacity-optimized tiers or with high-speed SSDs for an optimized analytics tier,
Native S3 Interface for next-generation applications for direct analytics on operational data and transparent application portability across on-premises and multi-cloud environments,
Advanced Secure File-based services to ensure corporate security compliance with NFSv4.

Simplified Development and Deployment of AI and Analytic Applications

High performance, continuous processing with Spark 2.3 for structured streaming and machine learning,
Analytics toolkit support with Hive 2.3 that has over 800 JIRAs resolved,
Non-programmer enablement to create streaming applications with KSQL,
Simplified streaming analytics application development with Change Data Capture (CDC) and KStreams,
Apache Drill 1.14 with expanded SQL support, high performance at scale and query experience with Hue,
Native language bindings (Python and Node.JS) and efficient queries directly on JSON data types without ETL for faster and easier database applications development.

Also Read : AI Discovery Engine Node Recognized in Gartner CRM Sales Report

Streamlined Security and Critical Data Asset Protection

Volume-based data encryption at rest provides an additional means to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. Encryption is also used to avoid exposure to breaches such as packet sniffing and theft of storage devices,
Secure by Default ensures that data platform security out-of-the-box including core and ecosystem services for new installations with a single click. All data can be stored encrypted and all network connections are encrypted with authentication enabled.

Partnerships

MapR partners with leading innovators in cloud computing. MapR also partners with leading software vendors to extend the value of their solutions, and with consulting and system integrator companies that provide consulting services and related implementation, integration, and training services to joint customers.

Justin Gillespie

“Our clients understand the importance of data and data-driven decision-making in their digital transformation journey,” said Justin Gillespie, principal and analytics practice lead at the Hackett Group. “MapR’s industry-leading data platform not only sets the bar for transformational analytics, AI and machine learning, but they are also delivering a platform that optimizes TCO, security, and agility throughout the enterprise, whether in the cloud or on-premises.”

Millennial Parents Cool with Babies Wearing AI Health Trackers, Finds IEEE

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July 6, 2018

Millennial Parents Cool with Babies Wearing AI Health Trackers, Finds IEEE

IEEE Unveiled ‘Generation AI 2018: Second Annual Study of Millennial Parents of Generation Alpha Kids’; Examined How Health- and Medical-related AI Technologies will Impact the Lives of the Most Tech-Infused Generation

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, recently unveiled “Generation AI 2018: Second Annual Study of Millennial Parents of Generation Alpha Kids.” The latest IEEE survey illuminates how millennial parents in the US, the UK, India, China, and Brazil with Generation Alpha children (eight-years-old or younger), think growing up with health- and medical-related AI technology will impact the lives of their children.

Born from 2010-2025, Generation Alpha is considered by many to be the most tech-infused demographic, and AI technologies are expected to infiltrate nearly every aspect of their lives.

Generation Alpha Trend Watch: Babies Wearing AI Health Trackers

Experts say wearable technology will soon be able to track patient health data, and by using AI and machine learning, physicians and wearable users will then be able to gain a better understanding of changes in that patient’s health. Millennial parents across the globe are most comfortable letting their Generation Alpha children use wearables to track their health starting with their teenage years (33 percent). However, more than half (58 percent) would have those ranging from as young as infancy to five-years-old (including toddlers) wear them.

Kids Not Feeling Well? AI Knows Why … and How to Fix it

In the next decade, AI will be even more developed, prompting clear majorities of Millennial parents in various countries to say they would have at least some trust in AI technologies for diagnoses and treatments of their Generation Alpha children.

More than half (56 percent) of Millennial parents globally said they would have at least “a great deal of” trust, with India (80 percent) and China (76 percent) leading the way.
Parents in the U.K. appear most skeptical, with less than four out of 10 — 37 percent — having at least “a great deal of” trust.
While there was a slight increase in the amount of US parents say they have at least “a great deal of” trust (43 percent in 2018 vs. 39 percent in 2017), the number of parents lacking trust increased as well (25 percent in 2018 vs. 15 percent in 2017).

Speak up and Smile: The Chatbot + Biometric Pediatrician is In

Experts say that in the future when people are ill they will be able to converse with a speech recognition-powered chatbot. The chatbot will use AI to compare the symptoms communicated against a database of diseases, patient history, and circumstances, then recommend a course of action.

How likely are Millennial parents across the globe to use an AI and speech recognition-powered chatbot to diagnose their sick Generation Alpha child, according to the survey?

More than eight out of 10 parents in Asia (85 percent China; 83 percent India), say they are likely to use an AI chatbot to diagnose their sick child in the future, including more than a third (38 percent India; 34 percent China) saying they are extremely likely.
However, approximately half of parents in the US (52 percent) and UK (50 percent) say they would not be likely to use this technology to diagnose their child.

Facial recognition software and machine learning are also helping clinicians diagnose rare diseases by analyzing patient photos and correlating detected irregularities with rare genetic diseases.

As for how comfortable Millennial parents would be using such technology to seek answers if they had concerns about their child’s health —

More than eight out of ten Millennial parents from Asia (81 percent in China; 84 percent in India), say they would be very comfortable using this technology for diagnosing their child.
Close to two-thirds of Brazilian Millennial parents (64 percent) say they would be comfortable using facial recognition and machine software to diagnose their child, while 52 percent of Millennial parents from the US indicated they would be comfortable.
However, 51 percent of UK Millennial parents say they would not be comfortable using facial recognition and machine learning technology to diagnose their child.

Robot Surgeons Get a Thumbs up to Operate on Millennials’ Children

Surgical robots powered by artificial intelligence are bringing new innovations and accuracy to the operating room.

Millennial parents in Asia are significantly more likely to allow robots powered by AI to conduct surgery on their Generation Alpha child (China: 82 percent; India: 78 percent), while 45 percent of Millennial parents in both the US and UK say they would be very likely.
Sixty percent of Millennial parents in Brazil say they would be very likely to allow robots powered by AI conduct surgery.
What’s more, 22 percent of Millennial parents in the US and 25 percent in the UK say they would be “not likely at all” to allow this surgery on their child.

In Life or Death Decisions for Generation Alpha Kids or Their Own Parents, Millennials Trust Doctors Relying on AI

When asked whether they strongly or somewhat agree with the statement that they would trust doctors that base their recommendations on data coming from AI to make life or death decisions regarding their Generation Alpha children:

More than half (51 percent) of Millennial parents in India say they strongly agree with this statement, while less than one out of 10 parents in India (5 percent) and China (7 percent) disagreed with this statement.
Close to one-third of Millennial parents from China (35 percent), the US (31 percent) and Brazil (31 percent) say they strongly agree.

Regarding Millennial parents’ agreement with the statement that they would trust doctors that base recommendations on AI data to make life or death decisions for their own parents, the survey found:

Forty-six percent of Millennial parents in India strongly agree with this statement, while close to one-third of parents from China (35 percent), one-quarter from Brazil (25 percent), 21 percent from the US, and 18 percent from the UK strongly agree.

AI, Not kids, Preferred by Millennial Parents for Care During Golden Years

Millennial parents say they would prefer to use AI to live independently during their golden years, rather than relying on their Generation Alpha children. This is especially true in India and China, but much lower among U.S. parents.

A clear majority of Chinese Millennial parents prefer to rely on AI (94 percent), with 79 percent of parents in India, and 61 percent of parents in both the UK and Brazil expressing the same sentiment.
In 2018, 56 percent of US parents said they would prefer to rely on AI, a seven percent decrease from 2017 when 63 percent of US millennial parents said they would prefer AI and 37 percent prefer to rely on their children.

Real-Time AI Health Monitoring and Data Tracking Will Become Routine in the Future

Majorities of Millennial parents across the globe are confident AI will make real-time, round-the-clock monitoring and data tracking of their health — including AI-powered reminders for medicine, exercise and doctor’s visits — a routine practice, especially in Asia.

While Millennial parents in Asia are overwhelmingly confident (India: 88 percent; China: 87 percent), parents from Brazil (61 percent), the US (60 percent), and the UK (55 percent) are also very confident this practice will become routine.

Millennials See Cancer Eradicated in Generation Alpha’s Lifetime, Thanks to AI

Medical imaging coupled with AI can now diagnose many forms of cancer even before anything is suspected. According to the survey, Millennial parents in Asia are significantly more likely to think AI medical breakthroughs in the future will likely eradicate cancer during their Generation Alpha children’s lifetime.

A majority of Millennial parents in China (85 percent), India (83 percent) and Brazil (70 percent) think AI medical breakthroughs will eradicate cancer.
Millennial parents in the US and UK are split on this future outcome; in the U.S. 53 percent think cancer eradication is very likely and 47 percent see it as unlikely, while in the UK 51 percent think cancer eradication is very likely and 49 percent see it as unlikely.

Currently, IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. “Generation AI 2018: Second Annual Study of Millennial Parents of Generation Alpha Kids” surveyed 2,000 parents, aged 20–36 years-old, with at least one child eight years old or younger — 400 each in the United States, United Kingdom, India, China, and Brazil. The surveys were conducted on 17-23 May 2018.

TechBytes with Joshua Smith, CTO, Kaon Interactive

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July 6, 2018

Joshua Smith
CTO, Kaon Interactive

Immersive Content and Visual Marketing are buzzing louder than any other marketing tool in 2018. Videos, AR/VR, and Live streaming content are perfect recipes for a powerful audience engagement at any time. We spoke to Joshua Smith, CTO, Kaon Interactive, to better understand the current state of visual marketing technologies and how his company would extend the benefits of their partnership with Google and Lenovo to customers.

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Tell us about your role at Kaon Interactive and the team/technology you handle.

I am a founder and CTO of Kaon Interactive. I am still quite hands-on with the technology, leading the platform team. We provide the infrastructure layers of the Kaon SaaS platform, which make it possible for the application programmers to easily deploy solutions across all kinds of devices.

What is the current state of 3D Marketing and Sales for B2B companies?

Using 3D as a way of demonstrating products is now an expected practice in many industries since it has been proven to improve the top line revenue and reduce expenses. Over the past couple of years, we have been moving our customers to use 3D visualization of scenes and abstract concepts, so that they can be effectively telling their stories. On the product side, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are the “new thing” that we’ve been helping our customers deploy. Since we are adding these features at the platform level, our customers don’t have to do anything new. Their existing 3D product models “just work” in AR and VR now.

Tell us more about your VR technology?

For high-end VR, we decided that instead of tying our customers down to one vendor’s SDK, we would instead build upon the evolving WebVR standards. That strategy has proven successful, as it allowed us to pivot from the first generation of VR hardware (Oculus, Vive) to the second generation (Windows Mixed Reality) without having to rewrite our applications. Although the WebVR standard seems to have stalled on mobile hardware, we already support it there as well, and once the transition to WebXR is complete, our customer applications will support VR on day one.

In the mobile application space, we were an early adopter of Daydream, which has allowed us to easily support the new Daydream-based all-in-one Lenovo Mirage Solo. We are very excited about this as a VR platform because it is low cost, requires no set-up, and the visual fidelity and tracking are outstanding. At last count, we have about 15 customer applications in the Google Play Store supporting this new device.

What are the core tenets of your partnership with Google and Lenovo?

Both Google and Lenovo are eager to find applications of AR and VR technology within the enterprise. We are the only company that is actively fielding AR- and VR-enabled sales and marketing applications in the enterprise space. So, both companies have been working with us to help define their products in ways that ensure maximum utility outside the games market. We benefit by getting early access to new technologies so that we can have things ready to field the moment new technology and devices hit the street.

How do you plan to extend the benefits of this partnership to your customers?

When Lenovo released the first Tango devices, our customer applications supported that on day one. When ARCore replaced Tango, our customer’s applications were immediately updated to support that. And when the Mirage Solo hit the market, we immediately had more than a dozen enterprise sales and marketing apps which supported it. Going forward, our customers can be confident that they are always on the leading edge of these exciting new technologies.

How are you competing against the established platforms for interactive content?

There aren’t any established platforms that support 3D AR and VR. There are game engines like Unity and Unreal, but they aren’t enterprise platforms. They don’t solve enterprise problems like making applications that work cross-platform out of the box, authenticating users, or pushing global updates instantly without waiting on app store approvals. There are enterprise content management platforms that do those things, but they are used to push videos, PDFs, or simple HTML5 applications. Our platform is the only one that works at the enterprise scale and also delivers the latest 3D AR and VR technology.

In 2018, to what extent do Product Innovation teams manage to bridge the gap between UX and CX? How do you achieve that in Kaon?

In the applications themselves, the key to providing a great CX is to conform to corporate brand standards and ensure the messaging is on point. Corporate messaging around products and solutions is constantly evolving, so having a platform that allows quick and painless updates and instant push to a global sales force across all devices is critical. The other key component of great CX is to ensure you provide value at every customer engagement touch point. If the customer first learns about your products on an interactive kiosk at a trade show, they should be able to continue that experience when they meet with the salesperson using a mobile application. And they should be able to access that same content themselves via the web and share it easily through business communication tools and social media. Making a great UX is important, but you cannot provide the CX you need without an enterprise platform. That’s Kaon’s “secret sauce” for CX.

What does your product and solutions roadmap look like for Mobile Marketing?

AR and VR are changing rapidly on mobile, and our roadmap is largely focused on making sure we are always the first to market as new capabilities reach maturity. That means WebXR, AR wearables, all-in-one VR, and finding new ways to exploit existing VR and AR platforms to help our customers close deals.

What technologies in AI/machine learning have you deployed, or plan to deploy in the coming months?

We have some machine learning experiments running in the lab, leveraging the tools and technologies becoming available on mobile. Thus far, there isn’t anything that we’ve found robust enough to deploy to an enterprise sales force, though. There are some image recognition apps in the marketing space that are certainly amusing and entertaining, but they don’t solve real customer problems in B2B sales. So, the short answer is nothing yet.

Thanks for chatting with us, Joshua.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Enterprises Embracing Video Calling To Drive Customer Service Innovation, Finds New Research From Sinch

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July 6, 2018

Enterprises embracing Video Calling to drive customer service innovation, finds new research from Sinch

Consumers Welcome Convenience of Video Calling to Talk to Brands and Businesses, While 24% Would Consider Switching Banks to a Provider That Offered Video Calling

Brands and businesses are increasingly integrating Video Calling functionality into their applications to help improve customer service, reduce costs, and acquire new customers – finds new research released recently by Sinch, part of global CPaaS provider CLX Communications AB.

Sinch’s Video Calling Survey, conducted in late 2017 in partnership with One Poll, canvassed 1,250 enterprises and 5,000 consumers across the UK, France, Germany, Australia and North America. The purpose of the survey was to shed light on both enterprise and consumer experiences and perceptions of the use of Video Calling.

The survey found that 24% of businesses now use Video Calling often to engage with their customers, while 21% expect to launch services within the next two years. The key benefits driving this uptake include improved customer experience (72%), being more approachable as a business (70%), reducing costs (51%), and easy in-app integration (34%).

Also Read:AI Breakthrough Announces Inaugural Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Award Winners

The majority of person-to-person video calls currently happen through third-party social media and messaging applications like Skype, Messenger and WhatsApp etc. especially on mobile phones. To capitalize on this user behavior, 38% of brands and businesses have already integrated video calling within their own mobile applications, while a further 46% are currently considering it.

The appeal of consumer to enterprise Video Calling is growing, with 39% of consumers surveyed now ready to have video calls with brands and businesses. In fact, in sectors such as banking, 24% of consumers said they would consider switching banks to a provider that offered Video Calling.

However, with only 24% of respondents able to name a brand or business currently offering Video Calling, a huge opportunity exists for enterprises to gain early adopter advantage through the integration of Video Calling within their existing customer service channels.

The survey also examines where growth areas are likely to be, both geographically and demographically – drawing conclusions on which industries could benefit from Video Calling, and what the future looks like.

Daniel Forsman, Chief Operating Officer at Sinch, commented: “The research provides a fascinating insight into how technology innovation, especially in the customer service space, has become a key differentiator for both enterprises and consumers. Consumers now expect to be able to engage with the brands and businesses in their lives whenever, and however, they like, with Video Calling becoming an increasingly important channel across multiple sectors from retail to financial.”

The Growth Market Striving for Top Spot by 2020

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July 6, 2018

The Growth Market Striving for Top Spot by 2020

The Growth Market Will Hold Their First Investors Day in September at Hilton Hotel

It is often questioned whether a commonly perceived “good” company, as defined by characteristics such as competitive advantage, above-average management, and market leadership, is also a good company to invest in. While the characteristics of a good company can point toward a good investment, how do you choose the right company to send you the right opportunities? You can look at a company with pretty much the same characteristics mentioned, however, it is highly important to include into this a personable customer service and transparency, as seen in companies like The Growth Market.

The Growth Market, a growing marketing company registered in London, are going above and beyond to tick every box possible and are aiming to be the top alternative introduction company based in the UK by 2020 and will be holding an investment seminar in September at the Hilton hotel.

Also Read: Announcing the Winners of the 2018 Iterable Growth Marketing Awards

“We are a financial introduction company working with recognized property developers, renewable energy providers and from companies raising funds in return for a fixed rate in the form of Bonds and ISA’s. We connect sophisticated investors and high-net-worth individuals to financial opportunities and pre-screened projects across multiple sectors. At The Growth Market, client satisfaction is paramount. We believe in open and transparent dealings and take extra care when carrying out full due diligence checks to evaluate the products we introduce. The organizations we work with are cautiously chosen so client requirements are met and opportunities are introduced according to risk appetite and client requirements. Our team comprises of experienced consultants coming from diverse financial backgrounds. Together, they offer sensible, tailored financial solutions following stringent business code of conduct. Appraisals and informed decisions are made by the client after thorough discussions covering all the pros and cons of the opportunity.

Director Ashley Smith, who was mentored by renewed hedge fund manager Tim Steer, said, “We look forward to holding our first event and will have speakers giving talks on different sectors such as Property, Renewable Energy, Crypto and other low risk fixed income markets as our main aim is to ensure people are educated on various markets and informed on available options. The Growth Market work much like GoCompare or Comparethemarket.com but rather than comparing insurance quotes and helping with saving on your utility bills, we aim to be the UK’s top information provider and alternative investment introducer for secured, fixed rate opportunities to make your saving grow into investments and I hope this Seminar helps introduce eligible investors to some great opportunities that are available in the markets and if we continue to introduce good successful projects, I am sure we will be at the top by 2020.”

Also Read: AI Breakthrough Announces Inaugural Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Award Winners

The Growth Market has helped to successfully raise over £10m form a variety of projects in both Property and Renewable Energy which in turn has given clients fixed returns. Ashley said, “We look at many projects throughout the year but only take on marketing the company if it fits into our S.M.A.R.T investment strategy. All opportunities we market have to have the highest Security available, the Management Team must have experience and track record in the field, an ArmChair investment allowing clients to benefit from a hassle-free income stream, bank-beating Returns and have a defined Timeframe and exit strategy. I believe this is one of the keys to our success so far and believe it is what sets us apart from our competitors.”

Another interesting USP to The Growth Market is their Code of Conduct.

The Growth Market’s Code of Conduct:

We are committed to providing a great service with every call and ensuring all of our clients understand that we’re here to act as an introductory agent only.
Although we are not required to be regulated by Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), we choose to operate our business operations according to the principles, guidelines, and regulations of FCA regulation. Therefore:
We act only as introductory agent and we do not offer financial advice.
We will ask all UK clients to declare if they are a High Net Worth / Sophisticated Investor or a Restricted Investor.
Each client will be allocated his or her own Portfolio Manager.
We encourage all investors to undertake independent financial advice before deciding to invest.
We will carry out our own Investment Due Diligence to ensure the team behind the project has a proven track record and this information will be available upon request.
We will not pressure or force any client to invest.
We will respect our clients’ privacy and will treat your information as private and confidential in accordance with the data protection act.
We never handle client funds directly – all funds are handled by a regulated custodian.

Quantzig’s Telecom Industry Client Minimized the Wastage of Marketing Dollars With Analytics

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July 6, 2018

Quantzig’s Telecom Industry Client Minimized the Wastage of Marketing Dollars With Analytics

The Marketing Analytics Solution by Quantzig Helped the Client to Measure Marketing ROI

Quantzig, a pure-play analytics solutions provider, has announced the completion of their latest marketing analytics study on the telecom industry. A telecom service provider wanted to measure, analyze, and manage marketing performance to optimize ROI.

*Marketing Analytics to Minimize the Wastage of Marketing Dollars for a Leading Telecom Industry Client. (Graphic: Business Wire)*

According to the experts at Quantzig, “Telecom service providers will have to develop innovative approaches to address the growing data needs of their customers.”

Also Read: Tips to Evaluate the Impact of E-Reputation Analysis – A Quantzig Whitepaper

The telecom industry has always handled huge volumes of data related to customers, operations, and transactions. Over the past few years, popular telecom service providers have executed numerous techniques to process these data sets, which include statistical analysis, data mining, and knowledge management among others. On an average, telecom service providers make billions of records on a daily basis, and it needs continuous monitoring and analysis in real-time or near real-time to generate maximum benefits.

The marketing analytics solution helped the client to measure marketing ROI while augmenting their marketing spend, improving customer experience, and maximizing overall profitability. The client was also able to improve sales effectiveness and minimize wastage of marketing dollars.

This marketing analytics solution provided benefits that helped the client to:

Measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns
Influence customers to upgrade services

This marketing analytics solution offered predictive insights on:

Driving maximum value from the company’s datasets
Improving the ROI of their marketing campaigns

Interview with Jeffry van Ede, Co-Founder and CEO, Simplaex

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Shalaka Nalawade

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July 6, 2018

[vc_wp_text]“Any change comes with challenges, such as selecting the right technology or product whilst ensuring transparency, efficiency and ROI.”[/vc_wp_text]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/simplaex” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffry-van-ede-7128101″]

How did the idea for Simplaex come about?

You might call it destiny. Moti (co-founder/CTO) and I met each other in an Ad Tech company in Berlin in late 2014. He joined as CTO and I was hired as a troubleshooter by the advisory board. We both felt that the market would soon make another turn and thus we were challenging the company’s status and future prospects. We decided to talk to all of the company’s clients (advertisers) and were strengthened in our belief that digital advertising would fully center around the extent in which audiences can be precisely and correctly classified from both ends of the advertising supply chain. It took us an hour to convince the shareholders and before we knew it, we found ourselves in a large transformation phase as founders of a new company.

What the foundational tenets of Wallace, your Artificial Intelligence officer?

Today, 4 years after we started, we have come to a point where AI is no longer part of our value proposition. It has become our value proposition. Therefore we decided to give “him” a name: Wallace. Analogous to a human brain, Wallace acts like a central nervous system that consumes information for a large number of sensory organs, i.e. supervised and unsupervised ML-algorithms. In order to take effective real-time decisions, this Bayesian-based core makes optimal autonomous actions to adapt to changes in significant factors governing the demand and supply in the advertising market. At the same time, it keeps up to speed with dynamically evolving user behavior, constantly updating user valuation while minimizing exploration costs.

How can Simplaex help advertisers increase ROMI?

The platform is designed to give advertisers full transparency on where and when the ads are being served to the audience that is most relevant to their advertising objectives. The powerful AI classifies existing and potential users based on multiple data points and accordingly builds an understanding of their preferences and behavior. Based on the user’s interaction with the Ad and beyond (e.g. usage of the App), predictive bidding is applied to target only the most receptive audiences. This results in a highly effective media investment with maximum return.

How does Simplaex help advertisers as well as publishers?

At Simplaex, we have a fundamental belief that advertising works best when all parties win; the advertiser, the publisher and of course the consumer. In parallel, the supporting technology must assist advertisers and publishers by providing both a consistent audience insight, act media independent and offer full transparency.

This summer, Simplaex will be the first to launch such technology, enabling the supply side to sell the same way that programmatic buyers want to buy. As ads move through the programmatic supply chain, the new product aligns the ROI interests of the demand and supply side by creating a unified insight in understanding and valuing consumer behavior. It is the first of its kind to align the interests of the two sides of the ecosystem and empowers them to step beyond the control of the walled gardens.

What, according to you, are the biggest challenges that digital advertisers are facing in 2018?

In my view, advertisers will have to make a strategic choice this year to what extent they depend on Google and Facebook. The duopoly forces advertisers to pay and play by their rules for as long as viable alternatives remain absent. Yet, advertisers should not underestimate their own influence. After all, they own the wallet in this industry. And as such, they have the power to change the status quo. The open programmatic ecosystem provides them with numerous opportunities to regain a healthy marketing/channel-mix. As always, any change comes with challenges, such as selecting the right technology or product whilst ensuring transparency, efficiency and ROI. In the end, it is all about advertisers moving closer to their most valuable partners, the publishers, with a technology layer that is as thin and transparent as possible.

How does Simplaex enable in-app retargeting?

Since we serve different verticals and clients with different business models, we apply different strategies and algorithms to maximize ROAS. What all campaigns have in common is how Simplaex’s AI is evaluating the existing user base and their in-app behavior according to the lifecycle of the app. After a short period of in-app evaluation, audiences are classified according to the advertising objectives. The AI engine then sets up its initial bidding parameters and tracks the interaction between the ad and the targeted audience. What follows is a continuous AI-driven optimization to identify the most receptive audience and to serve this audience the highest converting ads across the highest converting publishers, and all within the bandwidth of what the advertiser is willing to pay per engagement.

Simplaex recently announced that they were GDPR compliant, but with keeping in mind the recent Facebook data breach, do you think AI companies are more vulnerable to data threats?

At Simplaex, we had the advantage that the German regulations were already as strict as the European GDPR. Therefore, the design of our platform and the way we have built our algorithms already considered all of the requirements that will come into effect post-GDPR. As for AI companies in general, like all data-driven companies, they will face their own specific challenges. After all, Artificial Intelligence and the protection of personal data are intertwined. For instance, Article 5 of the GDPR lists the principles relating to the processing of personal data. It namely holds that the personal data must be processed in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject. But how can Artificial Intelligence ensure transparency for the users? This, and many more issues, such as the limitation of the amount of data which can be legally processed, will need to be addressed in the design of the AI product. For many AI companies, this will be a very challenging job.

Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign of yours?

I would like to refer to our first successful programmatic campaign shortly after we started. Not many companies at that time had much experience with app retargeting. During our stay in San Francisco, we met the team at Kabam and they were willing to give it a go with one of their Marvel games. We already had some successes with earlier campaigns but had never tested our algorithms at such large scale. Armed with a precise understanding of their players and their in-game behavior, we were able to predict the likelihood of players returning to the game at various game levels. The results were beyond our customer’s expectations in terms of how many players reengaged versus the net media spend. We were thrilled that our algorithms could pass this stress-test.

Are there any startups, in the MarTech space, that you are keen on?

We’re not keen on any particular MarTech startups. We’re focused on us and a new division at Simplaex that is developing a white label solution that enables SSPs and publishers to progress from an ad unit infrastructure to an audience-based performance model, delivering exponential value to both advertisers and publishers.

One word that best describes how you work.

Strategic. I like to focus on long(er) term success.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Scapple, a mind-mapping tool. I need something simple to quickly download my brain and to picture correlations between my thoughts and outside observations.

What is one of your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?

Don’t make a to-do list and instead delegate your to do’s immediately into your calendar and reserve the necessary time to get it done.

What is on your reading list right now? How do you keep yourself informed?

It’s not a book. At the moment I am reading about a dozen online articles a day that I select based on some keywords. In particular, I am interested in the tech challenges of premium publishers and how they build a sustainable business model for the next couple of years.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble.” I received this advice long before Ben Horowitz wrote it in his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, although it was not so poetically phrased.

Who’s the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read?

The first person to come to my mind is my Simplaex Co-Founder & CTO Moti Tal!

Thank you, Jeffry! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Jeffry” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d357a-6c46d712-3b68db8f-23cbd0ca-533c”]

Jeff’s professional endeavors started in retail followed by a successful career at Sony Corporation, where he occupied key positions such as Vice President of Sony Europe and CEO of Sony Deutschland. As managing director of NewMotion Germany, he introduced the first electric vehicle infrastructure to the German market, who are now the European market leaders in electric vehicle charging.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Simplaex” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d357a-6c46d712-3b68db8f-23cbd0ca-533c”]

Simplaex is the company behind the world’s most advanced Artificial Intelligence-powered user classification technology. As ads move through the programmatic supply chain, Simplaex aligns the ROI interests of the demand and supply side by creating a unified insight in understanding and valuation of consumer behavior.

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

[mnky_heading title=”MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fmartechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com%2Fcategory%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

Salesmate CRM Launches Built-in Phone to Supercharge Sales Experience

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July 6, 2018

Salesmate CRM Launches Built-in Phone to Supercharge Sales Experience

Salesmate CRM Takes a Leap Ahead and Strengthens Its Offerings by Releasing Built-In Calling Feature to Manage Client Communication More Effectively.

Sales personnel can now make and receive sales calls without integrating or switching between two separate software. Salesmate CRM has recently launched a built-in phone feature for its users. Businesses can also get virtual phone numbers from different countries and communicate seamlessly with the local clients of a specific country.

Sales reps can work from independent locations and still appear as an entity to the customer by using a single phone number. The new feature gives users the flexibility of automatically distributing the calls for dividing the workload. It keeps sales teams on track and increases productivity with functionalities like auto call logging and re-routing calls till it’s answered. Sales personnel can interact seamlessly with customers and access client profiles even during the ongoing call.

There is more flexibility of managing call logs and activities from a single platform. With Salesmate’s new built-in phone feature, users can record incoming and outgoing calls, get useful insights with call reports, take important notes during the call, set pre-recorded welcome messages and seamlessly forward calls to their smartphone.

Also Read: Your Best Customers are Calling: New Industry Survey Reveals Impactful Way for Marketers to Move the Needle and Drive Revenue

Salesmate users can now:

Convert anonymous calls into new contacts
Take notes during the calls, which will be saved in the timeline
Set personalized voicemail message in case of unavailability
Forward calls to your phone
Use your old number by porting it into our virtual phone system

Salesmate is an intelligent sales CRM assisting small and mid-sized businesses in converting leads into customers. A simple and easy-to-use CRM that can be personalized by every salesperson in the team. With Salesmate, sales reps can efficaciously manage sales pipeline and automate various work processes. Now, coming with built-in phone for more calling and productivity.

Celebrus Enhances Effectiveness of Digital Advertising with New Custom Audience Connector

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July 6, 2018

Celebrus Enhances Effectiveness of Digital Advertising with New Custom Audience Connector

Latest Connector Supports Creation of Custom Audiences in Google or Facebook

The latest version of the Celebrus Customer Data Platform (CDP) from D4t4 Solutions Plc has already added new features in the areas of Adobe Experience Cloud integration, audience segmentation and support for Apache Hive open-source data warehouse. The final headline feature is its ability to integrate with Google or Facebook ad networks with its new Custom Audience Connector.

Enhances Google and Facebook ad effectiveness with improved profile creation
Celebrus is the industry’s most advanced unified system for customer data and its advanced profile creation features are now being used to enhance the capabilities of leading ad networks Google and Facebook. The new Custom Audience Connector for Google or Facebook supports these networks’ audience-building features by enhancing their ability to profile users based on common attributes. This profile-matching can be based either on direct correlations between users or on more loose attributes that enable the building of lookalike audiences with similar interests.

Also Read: Verasity And XCHNG Partner To Enhance Digital Advertising

Enables compliant profiles of Google and Facebook users – in real-time
Celebrus not only provides first-party compliant data to enable this feature, overcoming any privacy or permissions concerns that may exist, but it also enables this capability in real-time as well as orchestrating adverts with existing Data Management Platforms (DMPs) for the most immediate, accurate and effective campaigns.

Broadest possible reach for Google clients
This feature holds particular benefits for enterprise users of the Google ad network. Integration with Google for creating custom audiences provides access also to YouTube, Gmail and Google Shopping users as well as the Search Network by leveraging Google AdWords Customer Match.

The Celebrus Custom Audience Connector is part of the latest release of the Celebrus Customer Data Platform, Version 8 Update 19. The new features in Version 8 Update 19 further broaden the appeal of Celebrus to enterprises focused on deepening customer engagement and are available immediately for new and existing Celebrus clients.

Nuance Continues to Lead in Delivering Matured AI-Powered Enterprise Intelligent Assistants

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July 6, 2018

Nuance Continues to Lead in Delivering Matured AI-Powered Enterprise Intelligent Assistants

New Report Helps Those Organizations Understand What Criteria They Should Consider When Evaluating Prospective Enterprise Intelligent Assistants Solutions

Nuance, a leader in conversational AI innovation, announced it has been awarded the highest combined rating of Intelligent Assistant (IA) and bot vendors for the second consecutive year in Opus Research’s “Decision Makers’ Guide to Enterprise Intelligent Assistants.”

Opus Research on Enterprise Intelligent Assistants Focused Heavily on Maturity of Offerings

The report presents a comprehensive assessment of IA solution providers with a focus on enterprise-grade solutions and ranks each organization on technology, the maturity of offerings, track record and future plan and vision. Key differentiators for Nuance —

a full suite of intelligent digital engagement offerings
ability to handle typed and spoken conversations on one platform

According to Opus, enterprise spending on Intelligent Assistants will exceed a projected $2 billion in 2018, heading for $5.5 billion in 2021 – a 67% CAGR for the next five years. This is a result of what Opus calls “the perfect storm where technological advancement in Speech Processing, NLU, machine learning and knowledge management coincides with (or gives rise to) heightened levels of comfort and confidence in human-to-machine communications.”

The Market for AI-Powered Enterprise Intelligent Assistants and Customer Engagement Solutions is Growing Rapidly

At the time of this announcement, Dan Miller, Lead Analyst at Opus Research, said, “The rapid adoption and use of new, conversational end-points and services may not have caught every business by surprise, but it has them scrambling to meet the growing demand from their end customers for intelligent, conversational brand experiences.”

Dan added, “This report helps those organizations understand what criteria they should consider when evaluating prospective solutions and provides an overview of vendor capabilities and track record, which can inform the process of getting an IA up and running successfully.”

Nuance received the combined top score leading 26 vendors. The company notably stood out for its impressive customer base, the high success rate for multiple verticals, and support of numerous devices and modalities. The list also listed companies — SundownAI, Verint, SmartAction, Synthetix, Omilia, and Verbio.

“As pioneers in bringing Conversational AI into the enterprise, we’ve seen first-hand the pressure today’s largest organizations face to deliver customer service that is fast, accurate and convenient,” said Robert Weideman, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Nuance Enterprise.

Robert added, “Nuance’s repeat performance and top ranking in the Opus Research report mirrors the results gained by the myriad enterprises that rely on our AI-powered customer engagement solutions.”

Currently, Nuance is recognized as a pioneer and leader in conversational AI innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. The company delivers solutions that can understand, analyze and respond to human language to increase productivity and amplify human intelligence.

TomTom Mapping Data to Power End-to-End Analytics Platform

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July 6, 2018

TomTom Mapping Data to Power End-to-End Analytics Platform

Alteryx Customers Can Now Accelerate Development of Data Science and Analytic Models with Tomtom’s Map Data and APIs

TomTom today announced that its comprehensive mapping data will be offered to Alteryx, Inc. customers as part of its self-service, end-to-end analytics platform. Alteryx is a data science and analytics company that helps companies to turn data into actionable insights. Building on a relationship of over 15 years, TomTom now becomes the sole map supplier for the Alteryx analytics platform, offering Alteryx users access to the highest quality mapping data – and thus geographic context – for their spatial analysis application development. In addition, for select countries, TomTom’s Maps APIs will be available in the Alteryx analytics platform, providing industry-leading geocoding and reverse geocoding capabilities.

“TomTom is proud of its long standing relationship with Alteryx, and we are thrilled to continue offering the incredible insights our map data and Maps APIs can provide to their customers.”

With TomTom mapping data, Alteryx users can analyze their customer data in relation to things like retail locations. They can also compare competitor locations to their own, and perform drive time analysis for desired demographic segments before determining the location of retail stores. These capabilities are an essential part of the Alteryx analytics platform. Customers in more than 70 countries across the globe have deployed the Alteryx platform.

Also Read: Tableau Executive Mark Nelson Joins Talend Board of Directors

Anders Truelsen

“With map visualization functionalities in the Alteryx analytics platform, users can gain insight with geographic context,” said Anders Truelsen, Managing Director of TomTom’s Enterprise Business Unit “TomTom is proud of its long standing relationship with Alteryx, and we are thrilled to continue offering the incredible insights our map data and Maps APIs can provide to their customers.”

Dean Stoecker

“Our long-standing collaboration with TomTom is demonstrative of our commitment to empowering customers with the data they need to solve analytic challenges directly within our platform,” said Dean Stoecker, CEO of Alteryx. “Our customers trust and leverage TomTom’s mapping data as a critical piece of the spatial analysis puzzle, providing geographic context.”

TomTom is relied upon by technology companies, geographical information systems (GIS) providers, government bodies and traffic management institutions across the globe to deliver industry-leading mapping products that create location-enabled applications.

TiVo Names Raghu Rau as Interim CEO

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July 6, 2018

TiVo Director Raghu Rau Appointed Interim President and Chief Executive Officer

TiVo Corporation announced that Raghu Rau, a member of TiVo’s Board of Directors, has been named interim President and Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. The appointment follows Enrique Rodriguez’s personal decision to resign from his role as TiVo’s President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors to assume a position as Chief Technology Officer at Liberty Global in Europe, one of TiVo’s long-time global customers. Mr. Rodriguez will remain at TiVo in an advisory role to ensure a smooth transition. Mr. Rau will continue to serve on the Board of Directors.

“On behalf of the Board, I want to thank Enrique for his leadership and we wish him the best in his next chapter”

Raghu Rau

The Board has commenced a comprehensive search process to identify and evaluate internal and external candidates to serve as a permanent Chief Executive Officer, with the assistance of a leading executive search firm.

“On behalf of the Board, I want to thank Enrique for his leadership and we wish him the best in his next chapter,” said James Meyer, Chairman of TiVo’s Board of Directors. “We are fortunate to have a world-class leadership team in place and are pleased to have someone of Raghu’s caliber step in to lead the Company. He has been a member of the TiVo Board of Directors since 2015 and is a proven leader with extensive experience in the video industry and in the management of intellectual property. I am confident that Raghu, alongside the rest of the leadership team, will continue to drive the value that TiVo’s innovative technology portfolio brings to the fast-growing and hyper-competitive entertainment industry.”

Also Read: TiVo and Tru Optik Ink New Deal to Make Linear TV Viewership Data Available for OTT Targeting

Mr. Rau, said, “This is an exciting time for TiVo and I am eager to jump in as interim President and Chief Executive Officer. I look forward to working closely with our outstanding management team as we continue to innovate, profitably grow our customer base in key market segments, and expand our international presence. I also look forward to working with the Special Committee of the Board to bring our strategic alternatives process to a successful, value creating solution for our shareholders.”

Enrique Rodriguez

Mr. Rodriguez commented, “My personal decision to pursue another opportunity was not easy. I couldn’t be more excited about what lies ahead for TiVo as I expect our performance through the second quarter of 2018, including our announced profit improvement actions, to be ahead of our internal plan. I am looking forward to continue my relationship with TiVo in my new role as a customer and partner. Until then, I am committed to working with the TiVo team to ensure a seamless transition.”

As previously announced, the TiVo Board continues to explore a broad range of strategic alternatives to maximize the value of the Company for TiVo shareholders. With its independent financial and legal advisors, TiVo is carefully considering a full range of options focused on delivering shareholder value. The Company expects to provide an update on this review by the Company’s second quarter 2018 earnings call.

Signum Capital Validates Fysical: A Decentralized Location Data Market

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July 6, 2018

Signum Capital Validates Fysical: A Decentralized Location Data Market

Signum Capital, a Singapore-based blockchain firm, announced their support for Fysical. Their strong interest in Fysical is in response to its location data market protocol for the next wave of big data: the physical world.

@Signum_Capital, a #Singapore-based #blockchain firm, announced their support for @FysicalProtocol via @MlgBlockchain #locationdata #bigdata

“We are honored to have the support of Signum Capital for our location data market protocol,” said Ben Smith, Co-Founder of Fysical. “We believe the next frontier of location data is offline, and that success starts with Fysical.”

John Ng Pangilinan

Fysical is a decentralized location data market protocol for the next data frontier: the physical world. With an initial focus on human location data, it provides the decentralized infrastructure for the next generation of big data: what stores you visit, where you travel, and how you move through the physical world.

Also Read: Exponential Unveils New Performance-Based Video Advertising Solution

“Fysical has created a functional and live location data marketplace and is already trading 15 billion data points from more than 10 million mobile devices every month. We’re excited to back this innovative, decentralized model and to help them build on their success,” said John Pangilinan, Partner at Signum Capital.

Signum Capital has a history of supporting high-profile blockchain companies including Omisego, Zilliqua, Kyber Network, Aelf and TenX. They assist their companies in areas they need the most; be it in community engagement for their main initial coin offering (ICO) sale, pairing with institutional buyers and advisers, or making strategic partnerships and M&A post-ICO.

Former AOL And MediaMath Director Rob Blake Joins Emotion AI Pioneers Realeyes As CRO

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July 6, 2018

Former AOL And MediaMath Director Rob Blake Joins Emotion AI Pioneers Realeyes As CRO

Martech pioneers Realeyes – which uses emotional AI software to help advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Mars maximise the impact of their video marketing – today announces it has hired Rob Blake as its Chief Revenue Officer.

Digital advertising veteran Blake, who has over two decades of experience working in leadership roles for companies such as AOL, Pocketmath, Advertising.com, Rocket Fuel and MediaMath, will be responsible for driving the company’s revenue growth around the world.

Mihkel Jäätma

Blake will be based at Realeyes’ London HQ and will report directly to CEO Mihkel Jäätma, who co-founded the martech firm while studying at Oxford University. The company – which recently announced a $16.2Mfunding round led by Draper Esprit to help grow its AI team – also has offices in New York, Boston and Budapest.

Also Read: Postie Launches Industry’s First Marketing Automation Platform that Makes Direct Mail Behave like a Digital Channel

Using webcams and the latest in computer vision and machine learning technologies, Realeyes measures how people feel as they watch video content online, enabling brands, agencies and media companies to optimize their content and help target their videos at the right audiences. Customers include brands such as Hershey’s, agencies Ipsos, MarketCast and Publicis, and media companies such as Turner and Oath.

Blake joins Realeyes from Pocketmath, the world’s largest self-serve mobile DSP, where he was SVP of Global Sales. Prior to joining Pocketmath, Rob was the Commercial Director, EMEA, of martech company MediaMath, and VP of Sales, EMEA, at the Performance Horizon Group. Rob also spent five years as VP at AOL Advertising and three-and-a-half years as the Director of Advertising.com.

Also Read: iResearch Data: Tencent Video App Led China Market with 600M MAU in May

Jäätma said: “I’m delighted to have someone of Rob’s calibre and depth of experience across the digital advertising sector onboard to help lead us into this next, crucial phase in our growth.

“Realeyes’ technology is a game-changer for marketers looking to maximise the impact of their video content and engage their customers at scale. By combining our pioneering emotive AI tech with Rob’s leadership and commercial know-how, we will ensure that Realeyes continues to lead from the front in the martech space.”

Blake said: “Having spent my career working across all of the various stages in the creative process – especially being involved with one of the earliest video campaigns to be launched in Europe – I understand just how important Realeyes’ unique insights can play in a campaign’s success.

Also Read: Lifesize Appoints SaaS Marketing Leader Anirban Datta as Chief Marketing Officer

“Adding a layer of emotional intelligence creates a whole new opportunity for brands to truly engage and understand their audiences in exciting new ways. Realeyes already works with some incredible brands, who use its pioneering tech and data to take their video marketing to the next level. I can’t wait to join a team with so much passion and purpose.”

Despite around 70% of marketing outcomes being driven by the effectiveness of the creative, only 10% of budgets are invested in that key success driver across the industry, meaning a lot of money is wasted on media that simply doesn’t deliver. Realeyes’ emotional tech platform quantifies the effectiveness of a creative and provides marketers with the tools they need to smash their campaign goals.

Postie Launches Industry’s First Marketing Automation Platform that Makes Direct Mail Behave like a Digital Channel

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