Ooma, Inc., a smart communications platform for businesses and consumers, today announced the company has expanded into the Asia Pacific region in support of its largest customer, IWG plc, and its industry leading brands including Regus and Spaces.

IWG, also known as International Workplace Group, is the world’s leading provider of hybrid work solutions, with more than eight million customers worldwide and 3,500 locations in more than 120 countries.

Ooma has recently enabled phone and unified communications services for IWG customers in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, as part of Ooma’s and IWG’s long term plan to establish cloud UCaaS services around the globe, and expects to add more countries in the region later in 2023. In total, Ooma now serves IWG customers in 25 countries across North America, Europe and Asia at brands including HQ, No 18, Regus, Signature and Spaces.

IWG partners with Ooma to offer two custom-designed phone plans to IWG customers: Business Phone, which has metered calling and no monthly fee, and Business Phone Pro, which offers a full suite of advanced features at an additional monthly charge. Customers can access their phone lines through mobile and desktop apps, or by purchasing or renting desk phones.

IWG also powers its unique centralized call answering (CCA) solution using Ooma. CCA allows IWG customers to have their calls answered by remote agents and directed per the customer’s instructions, just as if the business had its own personal assistant answering calls directly. Ooma enables IWG agents to know who is calling and how to direct the calls, along with advanced call queuing, distribution, management, a custom agent interface, and analytics to ensure an optimal customer experience.

Together, Ooma and IWG have developed tools and processes to onboard and manage a high volume of customers. Ooma APIs integrate with IWG systems for smooth and cost-effective customer enablement and support. The flexibility of Ooma’s platform has made it possible for IWG to satisfy differing needs around the world, manage its services more cost-effectively, and develop new revenue streams.

“IWG partnered with Ooma to smoothly migrate customers to our new phone plans, which were carefully tailored to our required specifications,” said Andre Sharpe, managing director of IWG Technologies in Zug, Switzerland. “Ooma’s support for our call answering center has further increased the efficiency and flexibility of this important customer service function.”

“We’ve been working with IWG since 2019 and in that time we’ve tapped every aspect of Ooma Business – small business phone service, enterprise unified communications, connectivity, and the customizability of our platform – to develop bespoke solutions for them,” said Eric Stang, chief executive officer of Ooma. “We stand ready to deliver the same level of customization and scalability to all our customers in need of innovative communications services.”

FOOM Club Ranking, a leading platform in the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is taking a significant leap forward in the AI industry with the launch of their innovative aggregator, designed for real-time tracking and measurement of Twitter/X’s bot influence. This groundbreaking development empowers users to track trending bots and discover AI personalities that harmonize seamlessly with their brands, opening up new horizons for AI-based marketing strategies.

Comparably dubbed as a "Botmarketcap" akin to the world-renowned Coinmarketcap, FOOM Ranking offers a comprehensive listing that encompasses not only FOOMbots but also influential third-party AI bots. These bots can be effortlessly monitored and contacted through the platform, thereby creating a dynamic environment for users to engage with cutting-edge AI technologies.

One of the most exciting features of FOOM Ranking is its ability to provide real-time results on bot performance. This is paramount for discerning the quality of AI bots and optimizing marketing services using FOOM's innovative creation tools. The dynamic ranking allows users to make data-driven decisions in real-time, thus propelling the AI industry to new heights.

The Process for Bot Listing and Ranking Criteria

Bringing your AI bot into the spotlight is a straightforward process with FOOM Ranking:

1. Nominate Your Bot: To get your AI bot featured on the platform, you simply provide comprehensive details about your bot and its unique characteristics. This step sets the stage for the evaluation process.
2. The Metrics: FOOM Ranking employs a robust set of metrics to assess bot performance. These metrics encompass elements such as engagement, wit, consistency, and flair, which collectively paint a comprehensive picture of each bot's capabilities.
3. Community Votes: The FOOM community plays an active role in the ranking process. Users are encouraged to cast their votes for the bots that resonate with them. This democratic approach ensures a community-driven ranking system that reflects the preferences of AI enthusiasts and industry stakeholders.
4. FOOM Ranking Team Review: The final step in the ranking process involves a thorough review by the FOOM Ranking team, which includes seasoned bot enthusiasts. This step ensures that the ranking is objective, unbiased, and aligned with industry best practices.

With FOOM Ranking's innovative approach to AI bot ranking and monitoring, businesses and individuals now have a powerful tool at their disposal to make informed decisions in the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. The platform's commitment to transparency, accuracy, and community engagement cements its position as a pioneering force in the AI industry.

Mitek is pleased to announce the appointment of Gillian Channer as the Vice President of Identity Product Management. With a distinguished career spanning product management, business operations, and technology thought leadership, Gillian brings a wealth of experience and industry insight to her new role.

Prior to joining Mitek, Gillian served as the Chief Product Officer for Capita, a leading United Kingdom-based consulting, transformation and digital services business. In this capacity, she led a customer-centric approach to product management across multiple business lines and held the position of Division Product Architecture Director, responsible for defining the company's technical product roadmap for both public and private sectors.

Gillian's impressive career also includes leadership roles at Oracle, where she most recently served as Senior Director of Business Operations. She played a pivotal role globally, driving growth, sales excellence, and customer satisfaction for Oracle's software technology and systems business in the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

In her new role as Vice President of Identity Product Management at Mitek, Gillian will play a strategic part in shaping and delivering the company's roadmap of innovative consumer identity solutions. She will lead a global team of technologists and business experts, driving innovation to protect the global fintech, financial services, and shared economy sectors from the growing threats of fraud and other financial crimes.

"Gillian's vision, record of achievement, and industry insight perfectly complement Mitek’s mission to safeguard the global fintech, financial services and shared economy industry sectors and our customers from online security threats,” said Mitek CEO Max Carnecchia. “While fraudster tactics may evolve, our commitment to innovation remains unwavering."

Channer holds an MBA and a Master of Science degree in coaching and behavioral change, both from the esteemed Henley Business School in the U.K. She is also a certified facilitator of human-centered design by the LUMA Institute.

“In addition to being an experienced product professional, Gillian gives us a fresh perspective and brings a broad skill set, combining executive presence with well-researched candor,” said Mitek SVP Chris Briggs. “We operate in a complicated technology environment. She can speak to customers about identity solutions with the insight, clarity and focus they need to make intelligent business decisions.”

New Apps Give Small Businesses and their Employees Greater Efficiency and Control of their Communication Services and Preferences

FluentStream, the preferred cloud communications provider by small and midsize organizations, today launched two new apps: FluentStream Admin and FluentStream Mobile. Both resources provide business owners and their employees greater efficiency and control of their communication services and preferences, enabling them to stay connected from anywhere.

As businesses continue to grapple with their work environment policies, research shows that hybrid and remote workforces will persist. In fact, by 2025, estimates predict that 36.2 million Americans will work remotely, a 417% increase from pre-pandemic data.¹ To support the growing population of SMBs that are opting for more flexible work environments, FluentStream is committed to delivering tools that enable hybrid and remote workforces.

“FluentStream continues to develop proprietary software that allows organizations to interact with their customers however and wherever they choose,” said Cass Gilmore, CEO, FluentStream. “Our new Admin and Mobile apps make it easier for organizations to reliably provide exceptional customer service regardless of where their employees are physically located.”

The new FluentStream Admin app gives business owners and operational managers complete control of their business phone system and settings. Administrators gain a quick and simple way to make changes to call routing, manage users, change time of day conditions and more. FluentStream Admin provides a streamlined, centralized conduit for administrators to easily manage the entire organization’s communication settings from any mobile device or location.

Natalie Merry, Director of Technology at FourStar Realty, a FluentStream customer for 10 years, said, “I’m so excited about this new tool. FluentStream Admin is intuitive and efficient. It’ll make my job easier and give me more flexibility and control. I appreciate that FluentStream listens to customer needs and delivers valuable tools like this that enable us to operate more effectively.”

FluentStream Mobile enables users to communicate with customers and collaborate with co-workers while on the go. Employees, such as healthcare workers, real estate agents, electricians and other highly mobile professionals, can use their personal phones to call, text, and access features such as visual voicemail and call forwarding from their work extension at any time. FluentStream Mobile increases productivity and improves customer satisfaction with faster response times and more after-hour service options.

Scorpion Levels the Playing Field for Local Businesses By Democratizing Generative AI Technology

Scorpion, the leading provider of digital marketing technology for local services businesses, is pleased to announce the launch of its new product offering, Connect with AI Chat. Local services businesses can now easily have their own specialized natural language conversational AI chatbot, capable of answering questions about their business and services, without requiring any technical expertise.

By democratizing a technology that was previously reserved for enterprise-level organizations, Scorpion helps level the playing field for local businesses. Each business using Scorpion's AI Chat benefits from a customized AI model available 24/7 and trained on the specifics of its company, its unique selling propositions, and its industry. The AI is further refined through ideal responses learned from hundreds of thousands of real customer conversations.

Connect was built for local businesses who seek a simple and effective way to engage with more potential customers online — from scheduling, to texting, to emailing, or paying invoices. It interacts seamlessly with website visitors, addressing their questions and guiding them to take relevant actions, such as scheduling an appointment or making a payment.

"Our customers want convenience and a great experience from the first time they interact with us on our website, all the way through to their service and purchase," said Toby Tippets, President of Big Mountain Heating & Air Conditioning. "Scorpion's AI Chat can answer questions about our services, help customers schedule an appointment, and even facilitate payment of an invoice. It's been like having an employee providing personalized customer service directly from our website."

Businesses equipped with their own AI chat now have a powerful tool that can continuously learn about their business and offer immediate, helpful answers and support to website visitors. Local businesses will have more opportunities to convert new leads and customers than ever before.

Scorpion's AI Chat is designed to address the unique challenges and opportunities that local services businesses face. While existing generative AI solutions sometimes struggle with inaccuracy or inappropriate responses, Scorpion's AI Chat has been specially tuned to deliver factually accurate, up-to-date, and safe responses. It also follows industry-specific workflows and behavioral guidelines developed through Scorpion's more than 20 years of experience with law firms and home service professionals.

"Generative AI technology like OpenAI's GPT models offer unprecedented opportunities for saving time through automated workflows," said Scorpion Chief Data Scientist Matt Bentley. "But making AI safe and effective for local services businesses requires a suite of supporting technologies, much like electricity requires infrastructure and specialized tools to become something that can be safely used by everyone."

Scorpion's AI Chat incorporates industry- and business-specific knowledge into each chat response, creating a personalized experience for every new conversation. This makes it effortless for website visitors to acquire the information they need to move forward in the buying process.

Local businesses utilizing Scorpion Connect with AI Chat can expect to:

• Improve Engagement: Help visitors go from "just looking" to "ready to get started."
• Enable Quick Scheduling: Convert potential customers into real appointments.
• Provide Accurate Answers 24/7: Scorpion's AI Chat responds regardless of the time of day (or night)!
• Reduce Workload for Staff: Work more efficiently by letting Scorpion's AI Chat answer the most common questions people have online.

The enhanced set of capabilities in the new CEP enables full-funnel interactions to drive lower CAC and higher LTV

Gupshup.io, the leading Conversational Engagement Platform, has unveiled a series of new and cutting-edge features in their latest launch. This latest update is designed to empower businesses to engage in personalized, two-way conversations with their customers at scale, especially as the festive season approaches.

The latest update streamlines and automates customer acquisition, qualification, personalized engagement, remarketing, and customer service. It introduces features such as audience categorization, automated retargeting for leads generated from click-to-chat advertisements, as well as from the brand's own channels. The addition of Gupshup.io's ACE LLM into generative AI-driven chat and voice bots guarantees high quality, precise interactions.

"The conversational phenomenon has seen a massive boost with the rise of LLMs, and we observe businesses transitioning to two-way interactions, whether for advertising, growth marketing, commerce, or support. Personalization is a crucial component of customer experience and with the emergence of click-to-chat ads, brands are now building their first-party databases and harnessing them to offer personalized and relevant interactions to their customers," said Gaurav Kachhawa, Chief Product Officer, Gupshup.io.

Top brands across verticals such as BFSI, retail, eCommerce and more are using Gupshup.io Conversational Engagement Platform to capture leads, nurture them through interactive campaigns and create delightful 1:1 experiences to drive higher engagement rates. Through the use of Gupshup.io's Bot Studio and visual journey builder, business users can craft omnichannel bot flows, quickly reducing the time to launch and optimize journeys. Through AI-powered Agent Assist dashboard, agents can aid consultative selling based on a customer's recent interactions, leading to better resolution and higher conversion rates.

Key capabilities in Gupshup.io's Conversational Engagement Platform

Personalized and interactive campaigns at scale

Now businesses can quickly launch advanced two-way interactive campaigns on channels such as WhatsApp with just a few clicks. With new capabilities in the campaign manager brands can easily make any message two-way by simply linking a journey to the template. Additionally, the Campaign Manager now offers an immediate preview of the selected template, allowing brands to see what the message will look like to their users.

Automated remarketing for cold leads acquired through conversational ads

Click to chat ads help businesses acquire leads from digital ads and qualify them through a chatbot conversation, eliminating the friction associated with form fills and app downloads. With the Conversational Ads Manager, brands can build their first-party database and drive higher conversions through remarketing within the same chat window. With this release, businesses can set up rules to automatically nudge leads that didn't convert earlier. Marketers can send retargeting messages up to 72 hours.

AI features to help save agent time and resolve customer problems better

While running a helpdesk on WhatsApp, it's time-consuming for agents and supervisors to catch up with lengthy chat history to get the context. With AI Summarize, Gupshup.io Agent Assist can generate a short blurb of the chat with the key details, so agents can seamlessly continue the conversation. Available in Beta. Agents can also leverage the Rephrase and Expand features to improve their responses, making them more professional and clear.

Full funnel analytics to help optimize spends and journey flow

Beyond advertising impressions and CTR, brands will now get insights on the chatbot funnel performance and retargeting campaigns effectiveness. Bot analytics now provides businesses with metrics and trends of conversations, messages, number of users, and returning users along with insights into typical drop off points.

ACE LLM for more natural conversations without redundant back and forth

Subsequent to the launch of ACE LLM in Q3, this release brings AI into the no-code journey builder, allowing business users to train bots on their enterprise knowledge base. With the ability to automatically identify intents and entities, the bot becomes smarter, avoiding needless questions that are already available in customer input.

Company introduces self-service "Plus" plan with Analytics, CDP and feature-management capabilities at just $49 per month

Amplitude, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMPL), a leading digital analytics platform, today announced the launch of Amplitude Plus, a new self-service offering that puts more capabilities from its platform into the hands of more teams at a lower cost. With Plus, businesses of all sizes gain access to the most powerful features of Amplitude’s Digital Analytics Platform to deliver better digital experiences and drive better outcomes.

Acquiring, retaining, and monetizing customers is critical for early-stage companies looking to scale. However, many teams cannot afford the full stack of tools they need to understand what their customers love, where they get stuck, and what keeps them coming back. The Plus plan levels the playing field by putting the full breadth of the Amplitude platform into the hands of every organization at an affordable price.

Starting at just $49 per month for up to 300,000 monthly tracked users (MTU), Plus includes Amplitude Analytics’ capabilities, powerful audience-management tools within its Customer Data Platform, as well as A/B testing, feature flagging and other feature-management tools previously only available in Experiment. The Plus plan is truly self-service – people can sign up online and get started immediately.

"We've heard the feedback that the pricing models for data analytics are broken. For the category as a whole, it's clear that event-based approaches can get expensive fast, pricing isn’t transparent, and the jump from free to paid is often steep," said Spenser Skates, CEO and co-founder of Amplitude. “With the Plus plan, we're changing all that. We're the first company to offer the best of our digital analytics platform in a self-serve way. It's available at the best price on the market. And we're making it super-simple to get up and running quickly."

The launch of Plus comes on the heels of an enhanced onboarding process to make it easier and faster for teams to get value from Amplitude. This includes:

• Taxonomy templates and event recommendations that make it easy to instrument data.
• Industry-specific starter templates that quickly surface product insights and guide users to more complex questions.
• Amplitude Academy offers flexible, self-paced learning, along with the Cohort community where industry peers share product and growth insights.

Organizations Recognize the Need to Blend Traditional and Generative AI and Incorporate Solutions that Enable Data Fabrics to Maximize AI’s Overall Impact

Qlik^® shows that enterprises are planning significant investments in technologies that enhance data fabrics to enable generative AI success, and are looking to a hybrid approach that incorporates generative AI with traditional AI to scale its impact across their organizations.

The “Generative AI Benchmark Report”, executed in August 2023 by Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) on behalf of Qlik, surveyed 200 C-Level executives, VPs, and Directors from Global 2000 firms across multiple industries. The survey explores how leaders are leveraging the generative AI tools they purchased, lessons learned, and where they are focusing to maximize their generative AI investments.

“Generative AI’s potential has ignited a wave of investment and interest both in discreet generative AI tools, and in technologies that help organizations manage risk, embrace complexity and scale generative AI and traditional AI for impact,” said James Fisher, Chief Strategy Officer at Qlik. “Our Generative AI Benchmark report clearly shows leading organizations understand that these tools must be supported by a trusted data foundation. That data foundation fuels the insights and advanced use cases where the power of generative AI and traditional AI together come to life.”

The report found that while the initial excitement of what generative AI can deliver remains, leaders understand they need to surround these tools with the right data strategies and technologies to fully realize their transformative potential. And while many are forging ahead with generative AI to alleviate competitive pressures and gain efficiencies, they are also looking for guidance on where to start and how to move forward quickly while keeping an eye on risk and governance issues.

Creating Value from Generative AI

Even with the market focus on generative AI, respondents noted they clearly see traditional AI still bringing ongoing value in areas like predictive analytics. Where they expect generative AI to help is in extending the power of AI beyond data scientists or engineers, opening up AI capabilities to a larger population. Leaders expect this approach will help them scale the ability to unlock deeper insights and find new, creative ways to solve problems much faster.

This vision of what’s possible with generative AI has driven an incredible level of investment. 79% of respondents have either purchased generative AI tools or invested in generative AI projects, and 31% say they plan to spend over $10 million on generative AI initiatives in the coming year. However, those investments run the risk of being siloed, since 44% of these organizations noted they lack a clear generative AI strategy.

Surrounding Generative AI with the Right Strategy and Support

When asked how they intend to approach generative AI, 68% said they plan to leverage public or open-source models refined with proprietary data, and 45% are considering building models from scratch with proprietary data.

Expertise in these areas is crucial to avoiding the widely reported data security, governance, bias and hallucination issues that can occur with generative AI. Respondents understand they need help, with 60% stating they plan to rely partially or fully on third-party expertise to close this gap.

Many organizations are also looking to data fabrics as a core part of their strategy to mitigate these issues. Respondents acknowledged their data fabrics either need upgrades or aren’t ready when it comes to generative AI. In fact, only 20% believe their data fabric is very/extremely well equipped to meet their needs for generative AI.

Given this, it’s no surprise that 73% expect to increase spend on technologies that support data fabrics. Part of that spend will need to focus on managing data volumes, since almost three quarters of respondents said they expect generative AI to increase the amount of data moved or managed on current analytics. The majority of respondents also noted that data quality, ML/AI tools, data governance, data integration and BI/Analytics all are important or very important areas to delivering a data fabric that enables generative AI success. Investments in these areas will help organizations remove some of the most common barriers to implementation per respondents, including regulation, data security and resources.

The Path to Generative AI Success – It’s All About the Data

While every organization’s AI strategy can and should be different, one fact remains the same: the best AI outcomes start with the best data. With the massive amount of data that needs to be curated, quality-assured, secured, and governed to support AI and construct useful generative AI models, a modern data fabric is essential. And once data is in place, the platform should deliver end-to-end, AI-enabled capabilities that help all users - regardless of skill level - get powerful insights with automation and assistance. Qlik enables customers to leverage AI in three critical ways:

• A trusted data foundation for AI – Qlik’s data integration and quality solutions leverage AI to automate data delivery and transformation, reducing complexity, mitigating risk, and enabling data fabrics.
• AI-enhanced and predictive analytics – Qlik has a long track record of delivering AI-enhanced and predictive analytics capabilities. Qlik’s OpenAI connectors extend the power of generative AI to Qlik analytics, bringing even more powerful chat capabilities to a rich user experience.
• AI for advanced use cases – Qlik AutoML™ helps organizations scale data science investments while enabling technically inclined staff to customize AI solutions for new use cases.