A Year After Finalizing Their Collaboration Amazon and Microsoft Have Integrated Alexa with Cortana. The Integration Intends to Give Tough Competition to Apple’s Siri and Alphabet Inc’s Google Assistant There has been some interesting news developing for users of Alexa and Cortana in the United States. Owners of Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana will now be able to access features of both, Alexa and Cortana. Hence, Alexa owners can latch onto Cortana features and vice-versa. The integration adds tremendous…

Voicify, a voice experience platform company, announced it has completed a significant round of financing from Boston-based Martech Ventures. With this investment, Voicify will expand the senior leadership team, open an office in Los Angeles and continue to invest in product development.  Voicify was established in 2017 and is headquartered in Boston, MA. Jeff McMahon, Chief Executive Officer of Voicify said, "This financing is well timed as it builds on an exceptional year in which Voicify has quickly developed a…

IBC2018, the world’s most influential media, entertainment and technology show, announces three new Keynote speakers from globally renowned media and entertainment powerhouses. The addition of executives from Amazon, Viacom and Wonderhood Studios adds to the big-name line up of thought provoking and informative sessions and speakers already announced by IBC. “The past 12 months have shown that delivering premium content is crucial for media enterprise to succeed. As the rapidly changing media landscape continues to…

Voice Searches Need You to Step Up Your Game When It Comes To Content Marketing In the month of May, at Google I/O 2018, CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated Google Assistant AI placing a realistic phone call and having a 'real' conversation with a human being for an appointment. Earlier this year, Amazon was forced to explain how Alexa recorded a private conversation and sent it to an Echo user’s colleague without their knowledge. These two separate incidents only demonstrate the power of voice search and our…

Consumers Tend to Purchase Where They Search with 51% of Consumers Starting Their Online Shopping Journey on Amazon Amazon's influence on consumer shopping behaviors continues to accelerate. Data from a new Future Shopper study released by Salmon, a Wunderman Commerce company, shows Amazon leads as consumers' preferred starting point for shopping (51%), and also dominates where consumers complete the majority of their online purchases (55%). Over 3,500 consumers who shop online across the US and UK were surveyed for this…

Linc Global, the Customer Care Automation platform used by leading customer-centric brands, today announced it has been selected as the winner of the Best AI Solution for Customer Service for the 2018 Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Awards. The award recognizes the best companies, technologies, products, and services throughout various categories of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, vertical applications, smart robotics and many more. “We are thrilled to be recognized as the Best AI Solution for…

New Funding Led by Foundry Group Comes on Heels of Financial Breakeven and Groundbreaking New Products to Power Precisely Coordinated Real-Time Customer Interaction Across All Marketing Channels Digital growth company Urban Airship recently announced that it raised $25 million in Series F funding led by Foundry Group. In addition to Foundry, current investors True Ventures, August Capital, Intel Capital, Verizon Ventures, QuestMark Partners and Franklin Park Associates all participated in the round. Already operating at…

New Acquisition Deepens Investment in AI and Conversational Marketing to Transform the Way Brands Engage with Customers Today, Leanplum announced the acquisition of Connecto. Connecto is a provider of AI-powered conversational marketing. With this acquisition, Leanplum is taking the next step forward in transforming the relationship between brands and their customers. By bringing together Connecto's AI-driven automation with Leanplum's mobile engagement platform, brands will be able to engage their customers in real-time…

Some of the Biggest Themes in The Internet Trends Report This Year Include Privacy, Ecommerce, China, And Work China will soon overtake the US (in terms of technology and its consumption), Ecommerce is at an all-time high, cryptocurrency has exploded, having quadrupled since Jan 2017, and yes, artificial intelligence is proving to be more important to human history than fire. That’s the much-awaited Mary Meeker 2018 Internet Trends Report in a nutshell. Of course, the 294-slide report, presented by the Kleiner…

LiveEngage for Voice Assistants Is the First to Work Seamlessly Across In-Home Assistants and Messaging on Smartphones LivePerson Inc., a leading provider of conversational commerce solutions, announced the launch of LiveEngage for Voice Assistants, the most advanced way for brands to connect conversationally, at scale, with consumers using Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. As well as performing simple tasks like paying a phone bill or checking an account balance, it is the first conversational platform for the enterprise…

MAZ Was Founded by Former Apple and Adobe Designers and Engineers New York City-based software company, MAZ, announced that they have launched the world's first Content Logistics System to solve the issue that all media companies and brands face of delivering their content to an ever-growing/unscalable list of social platforms, devices and operating systems. Content logistics is a brand new category of cloud-based software which addresses the problems in the part of the content supply chain that facilitates the efficient…

Privy's CEO Ben Jabbawy Tells Us How to Draw Audiences to Your Website  Did you know that ninety-eight percent of the visitors to your website may actually never convert! With an ever-expanding universe of digital businesses catering to an almost similar set of audiences, the chances of converting and reaching a higher percentage of the audience could actually be even smaller. To help small businesses and retailers understand the true state of marketing and sales automation and the power of optimized email lists, Privy…

In 2011, there were around 150 of them. In 2017, there were just over 5000 approximately. At the Martech Conference, Chief Martech Scott Brinker declared that there are around 6089 in 2018. To gauge the path in which marketing is heading in 2018, it’s appropriate to gauge where Martech is heading. The marketing technology stack of today is like one big meadow with resources and tools in abundance and a whole bag of integrations to choose from. Let’s contemplate the state of affairs for Martech in 2018 and pin some trends…

Every year, new advancements in the technology space have assisted businesses by creating new opportunities for customer outreach. One of greatest technologies of our time is Artificial Intelligence (AI) which has been creating quite the buzz in the B2B arena. Even though marketers have tested the waters when it comes to machine learning algorithms, there is still major ground to be covered when it comes to predictive analytics, personalization, statistical analysis as well as lead generation. Given its potential, Artificial…

 2018 Promises to Be Even More of a Banner Year for Artificial Intelligence in This Lucrative Area The year 2017 saw many technological advances, including the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in B2B marketing. Overall, AI has affected many different parts of the marketing strategy, as well, including account identification. Predictive intelligence is one major area of AI making advances into areas such as voice assistants and smart home technology and is utilized by Clickback’s robust B2B lead generation…

"It’s important for marketers to have a comprehensive voice strategy and understand the use cases that the different voice platforms present." Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be part of a Voice AI company? My entire career has been focused on building products and marketing them. I cut my teeth at EMC Corporation where I spent most of my time on new product launches. At LogMeIn, I was involved in building and launching a number of the company’s new product initiatives, like join.me.…

Yext, Inc, the leader in Digital Knowledge Management (DKM), announced it powered 1.45 billion driving directions requests and more than 590 million phone calls from the Yext Knowledge Engine in the year ended January 31, 2018. These milestones further demonstrate the power of Digital Knowledge Management to drive customers to businesses around the world. Also Read: Yext And Trustpilot Partner To Offer New Customer Reviews Integration "Leading brands are choosing Yext because they understand the transformation that is…

Urban Airship's New Predictive Machine Learning and Intelligent Orchestration Allows Marketers to Effortlessly Coordinate Communications Across All Digital Channels and Reduce Costs Leading digital growth company for brands, Urban Airship has announced the extension of its open data and channels to support existing MarTech solutions, while adding new native support for triggered email and SMS notifications. Urban Airship AI Marketing Orchestration Allows Brands to Grow Beyond Contemporary Personalization Standards in an…

Our MarTech Radar Brings You The Top 150 B2B Technology Companies That We Believe Would Continue to Excite Us the Most With Their Cutting-Edge Insights, Events, Content, and Product Updates. https://twitter.com/chiefmartec/status/951089558581628928 In the first month of 2018, we bring you the top 150 B2B Technology Companies that we believe every marketer should be aware of. Thanks to Chief Martech’s ever-growing technology landscape, we had an exciting time digging into what these 150 companies would have to offer in…

"CMOs should partner with a solutions provider who has the insight and data on what works and what doesn’t for their respective brands."Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to start a conversational platform? My co-founder Andrew has had a long career which began in chat in the 90s. He was actually the one that was adamant about the power of messaging and what conversational interfaces could become. The space was a natural evolution for me creating successful products and observing the rise…