Xsolla Acquires Lightstream, Rainmaker and API.stream to Empower Creators and Enhance Content Creation and Distribution

Xsolla, a global video game commerce company, is thrilled to announce its strategic acquisition of Lightstream, Rainmaker and API.stream from Videndum, the parent company. These innovative sets of tools are designed to revolutionize the landscape of content creation and distribution.

This acquisition underscores Xsolla's recognition of the tremendous value creators bring to the gaming ecosystem and is dedicated to building and strengthening relationships with talent agencies, creators, and their audiences.

Xsolla Partner Network already serves as a one-stop solution for engaging developers and publishers and exploring new revenue and rewards opportunities. With the acquisition of Lightstream, Rainmaker and API.stream, Xsolla will allow creators to go live within seconds via cloud streaming services, request free keys from game developers, participate in referral programs, create their branded web shops and sell digital goods for games in Xsolla's portfolio.

Lightstream is a cloud-based streaming studio that allows creators to produce and share live content effortlessly. By integrating Lightstream's technology, Xsolla will enable creators to easily initiate live streams with minimal technical requirements, facilitating an efficient and user-friendly streaming experience.

The Rainmaker platform empowers creators to manage and grow their audience while maximizing revenue opportunities. Integrating Rainmaker's tools into the Xsolla Partner Network will provide creators with a comprehensive suite of features designed to optimize audience engagement, monetization, and distribution of free keys.

API.stream stands as a remarkable team of talented engineers who have dedicated themselves to advancing the future of live-streaming production. With years of experience tackling the challenges and possibilities of live cloud-native output, API.stream has unlocked new avenues for creative expression in live streaming.

"Xsolla is committed to supporting creators and providing them with the tools they need to succeed," said Chris Hewish, CEO of Xsolla. "The acquisition of Lightstream, Rainmaker and API.stream reinforces our dedication to delivering extra value to the gaming community and making the Xsolla Partner Network an all-encompassing solution for developers, publishers, creators, and their audiences."

ZoomInfo Platform Offers 321 Million Contact Profiles, a 3x Increase Since 2021

ZoomInfo, the go-to-market platform to find, acquire, and grow customers, announced that its global business-to-business (B2B) data now covers 321 million professional contacts at 104 million companies, giving customers vastly expanded access to business buyers around the world.

In just the last two years, ZoomInfo has grown the number of global companies in its data platform by more than 6x, while tripling both the number of global contacts and the number of global mobile phone numbers available to its customers. In continental Europe, ZoomInfo has expanded its catalogue of mobile numbers by 13x whilst growing mobiles in the U.K. by 6x.

Following recent, significant investments in its international data, ZoomInfo customers now have access to over 200 million business contacts markets outside North America – such as Europe, Asia, and Australia. This expanded coverage gives sales and marketing teams a competitive edge globally by broadening their reach and enabling more effective strategies when targeting international markets.

“We leverage our large, proprietary contributory network and advanced capabilities to develop scale and quality of data that is unmatched in the industry,” ZoomInfo Vice President of Product Management Sneh Kakileti said. “With a focus on expanding our offerings in EMEA, we’ve invested significantly over the past two years into enhancing our global company and contact intelligence. GTM teams both in the U.S. and abroad can now close more deals with customers around the world.”

ZoomInfo has also invested heavily in its data assets beyond its global contacts and company profiles, providing revenue organisations with access to more than:

Worldwide:

• 174 million email addresses
• 94 million mobile numbers
• 70 million direct phone numbers

Outside North America:

• 104 million email addresses
• 45 million mobile numbers
• 27 million direct phone numbers

“We’ve worked with ZoomInfo since 2021. As a global business we rely on data to drive multiple business functions,” said Patrick Scully, managing director at Kintec Recruitment, located in Manchester, England. “ZoomInfo’s platform is fantastic — it’s the best tool for sales/cold business development. I’ve used it to close significant new business deals within my region. I rate the product highly and have seen valuable improvements in their global data coverage. I look forward to continuing to drive growth through our partnership.”

ZoomInfo utilises artificial intelligence (AI) technology to guarantee greater accuracy in its contact and company profiles. In addition, a dedicated team of over 300 researchers actively collects and verifies data, validating each data point through a multi-step process.

ZoomInfo is a leader in privacy, with a particular focus on supporting global enterprises and European businesses. ZoomInfo supports privacy compliance by giving revenue teams the ability to turn on suppression of Do Not Call lists for several countries — which can be used alongside their master suppression lists and ZoomInfo’s other privacy-focused features — enabling them to hide phone numbers and other contact info belonging to individuals who have unsubscribed from that company’s communications or who have registered with their country’s national Do Not Call registry. ZoomInfo applies rigorous methods to ensure data integrity and compliance with international regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, including sending email privacy notifications to all addressable data subjects, regardless of their geographic location, as well as by making it easy for individuals to exercise their data rights using ZoomInfo’s Privacy Center.

Bango, the global platform for data-driven commerce, today announces a strategic partnership with leading content provider Sam Media to enable Direct Carrier Billing for its extended reality (XR) content. Consumers across the globe can sign up for premium XR subscriptions and conveniently add the charge to their telco bill without requiring the use of a payment card.

XR mirrors the physical world in digital form, enabling cutting edge entertainment and experiences for users to immerse themselves in. Sam Media’s innovative technology uniquely brings XR content to everyone on any device - there’s no need for expensive equipment. All users need is a smartphone with internet access. Streaming capabilities also adjust to the available bandwidth so users without access to 5G can enjoy this immersive content.

Bango extends Sam Media’s Direct Carrier Billing coverage to ensure users can quickly and easily pay for a range of XR subscription services. This includes products like BeyondVR, a virtual world like no other, delivering a range of games with strong engagement elements, plus Sam Media and Stingray’s SingSpace by Stingray Karaoke, a new groundbreaking immersive virtual reality platform that revolutionizes the karaoke experience.

Direct Carrier Billing is a globally accepted payment method due to its super-convenience – users simply tap a button and place the charge on their mobile phone bill. It also opens up payments in markets where access to traditional methods including credit card is limited.

“We’re delighted to be powering payments for Sam Media’s premium XR subscriptions, making them accessible to more users around the world. With the increasing popularity of XR content, expanding payment reach is essential to ensure consumers can enjoy this new immersive experience.” Anil Malhotra, CMO at Bango.

“Making our XR content accessible to everyone, on any device, is our main mission. By working with Bango we can quickly launch DCB across key territories around the world to enable users to enjoy our premium content. Presenting a great customer experience from start to finish is key and DCB delivers the simplest and most convenient way for our customers to pay.” Alexis Bartelds, CEO at Sam Media.

New Generative AI capabilities strengthen identity, intelligence, and activation solutions in the Zeta Marketing Platform, as announced at ZETA LIVE 2023

Zeta Global, the AI-powered Marketing Cloud, announced new Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP) solutions to provide enterprise brands with powerful AI-enabled capabilities that deliver better experiences for consumers and better results for marketing programs. The new solutions were first revealed at Zeta’s annual New York City based conference, ZETA LIVE 2023, which brought together thought leaders from across the spectrum of business and culture to discuss the future and power of Intelligence.

During the conference’s Product Keynote, Zeta’s Chief Technology Officer, Chris Monberg, and Chief Data Officer, Neej Gore, unveiled new innovations in identity, generative AI, and consumer engagement delivered through the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP). The unified solutions within a single platform will enable enterprise brands to unlock actionable intelligence to make more informed business decisions, improve personalization across all touchpoints, and deliver stronger business results for brands.

Chris Monberg and Neej Gore jointly stated, “Our long-term investments in our Data Cloud and AI, coupled with new innovations that build on the disruptive force of Generative AI, sharpen the ZMP’s differentiation and bring us closer to our vision to make sophisticated marketing simple. The ZMP is one of one. It is the only platform that integrates data from outside a client’s four walls to work seamlessly with their first-party data. Furthermore, the ZMP creates incremental intelligence that augments a brand’s existing customer profiles and bridges the enhanced profile to personalized engagement across multiple channels - all while generating a lower total cost of ownership. It’s a very complex process, but our clients, the world’s most sophisticated marketers, demand more. We truly believe the companies that win in the future will use AI to create and sustain more profitable relationships with consumers through actionable intelligence.”

“Despite massive investments in data and technology, marketers still struggle to personalize more than 50% of their customer interactions, and that number is a lot lower for personalizing journeys,” said Gerry Murray, Research Director, Enterprise Marketing Technology at IDC. “Personalization at scale is crucial to customer experience, loyalty, and lifetime value. As a result, we’re seeing an uptick in replacement of older martech solutions in favor of modern platforms with deeper engagement, intelligence, and data capabilities.”

“We chose Zeta based on their vision and commitment to stay ahead of the market. We are excited to be partnering with Zeta to redefine and deliver cutting-edge Generative AI capabilities that will elevate the way we engage clients and prospects. Together, we are building the AI-powered marketing technologies that will power the next generation of customer experiences,” said Sarah Sharp-Wangaard, VP of Marketing, Hibbett.

New and enhanced Zeta Marketing Platform solutions include:

Powering Enterprise Data Strategies with Connectivity, Efficiency, and Transparency With a CIO

• Clean Room: Zeta Clean Room provides a secure environment for sharing data, allowing you to safely tap into the power of partner data to expand your reach.

• Data Governance: New data governance controls such as enhanced metadata, intuitive data structuring, privacy safeguards, and advanced data normalization make it easier to nurture customer trust.

• Unified Connectivity: A holistic view of all your brand’s inbound data and outbound channels. With this comprehensive visibility, you can monitor data flows in real-time, measure the performance of each source and destination, and optimize your overall data strategy.

Unmatched Intelligence and Generative AI That Provides Answers to Marketers’ Challenges

• Release of Zeta Opportunity Engine (ZOE): ZOE enables marketers to ask questions and receive real-time solutions. ZOE also generates content across many topics including user onboarding, product support, and reporting.

• Revenue Forecasting & Recommendations: Analyze vast amounts of data to forecast and identify revenue opportunities, visualize your campaign-related revenue and optimizations, and predict the potential impact of recommended actions.

• Marketing Mix Models: Forecast your media spend, enabling you to make informed decisions with confidence. This suite of tools includes Scenario Explorer (simulates the results of a specific channel mix), Automated Media Mix (optimizes media spending for revenue, clicks, or conversions), and Margin Optimizer (determines the ideal channel mix for new spend increments.)

• Customer Growth Intelligence App: Available via Snowflake’s Data Marketplace, event predictions help brands understand future trends on key metrics, such as conversions and site visits. Paired with signal data from Zeta’s Identity Graph, brands can proactively plan for predicted trends to optimize conversions and campaign outcomes.

Omnichannel Media Activation Within the ZMP, To Wrap Around Your Existing Technology

• Media Activation Pro: Create personalized and continuous omnichannel media interactions.
  • Enable simplified, intelligence-backed media and programmatic capabilities that seamlessly integrate into the customer journey.
  • Monitor the performance of your programmatic campaigns in real time.
  • Connect the dots between media touchpoints and desired outcomes with media attribution.

• Linear TV To Digital Attribution Optimization: Through Zeta’s partnerships with set-top box data providers, connect ad exposure data directly to your customer data, offline sales, or online web activity.

Acquisition unlocks new market opportunities and expands existing portfolio of business productivity products to include industry-leading marketing automation solution

airSlate, a leading provider of business productivity and automation solutions, today announced its acquisition of Instapage, an innovative company which offers scalable solutions that empower marketers to create personalized landing pages. This strategic move broadens airSlate's existing product portfolio by introducing a cutting-edge solution that enhances the digital advertising outcomes of businesses by automating the creation of conversion-optimized landing pages. airSlate is currently valued at over $1 billion, and the company’s suite of products serves over 100 million users around the world.

As the modern consumer increasingly relies on the Internet for product research and purchase decisions, the significance of well-optimized landing pages to convert potential prospects into customers has grown exponentially. Instapage, with its proven track record, has assisted numerous businesses, including industry giants like Verizon and other forward-thinking companies like Lattice, in improving their digital advertising performance by offering personalized landing pages designed for high conversion rates.

Borya Shakhnovich, CEO and co-founder of airSlate, emphasized the company's commitment to enabling businesses to work efficiently, scale effectively, and unlock their full potential. He stated, "Our suite of solutions is purposefully crafted to empower businesses with enhanced productivity. We are thrilled to incorporate Instapage's capabilities to further bolster our support for our customers' business automation requirements."

airSlate boasts a successful history of acquiring companies and elevating their market reach and revenue. Recent acquisitions, such as SignNow, a prominent e-signature company, US Legal Forms, housing one of the largest collections of online legal forms, and DocHub, a versatile PDF annotator and e-signature tool, have all experienced remarkable growth and substantial revenue increases under airSlate's ownership.

“Instapage’s alignment with airSlate's mission, centered on intuitive and cost-effective automation of critical business and marketing operations, will bring tremendous value to businesses across industries,” said Saranya Babu, General Manager of Instapage. “As more and more businesses optimize their marketing technology stacks to streamline and automate their workflows, the combination of Instapage's product expertise and airSlate's robust ecosystem will accelerate and expand the support for customers seeking to simplify key business processes through automation.”

Enables Multi-Document Content Search and Summarization Powered by Box AI

Announces Beta for Box AI Capabilities in November

Box, Inc., the leading Content Cloud, today unveiled Box Hubs to make it easier than ever to securely curate and publish content across the enterprise. Box Hubs will deeply integrate with Box AI so customers will be able to find answers to critical questions in seconds, automatically summarize vast amounts of information, and effortlessly create new content – all based on the documents users organize in a Hub.

“Companies are facing unprecedented challenges when it comes to organizing and making sense of vast amounts of content,” said Aaron Levie, Co-founder and CEO of Box. “Keeping teams on the same page; giving people the latest data; putting the right information in the right partner’s hands – are all essential to how organizations run. With Box Hubs and Box AI, we’re making content in Box infinitely more useful and valuable. From sales enablement and HR policies, to brand libraries and product development teams, Box Hubs will transform how we collect, manage, and publish content.”

According to IDC, approximately 90 percent* of data generated by organizations today is unstructured. This data includes all the content flowing through an enterprise, including spreadsheets, videos, documents, and more, and contains an organization’s most important information.

“As the amount of unstructured data continues to increase, organizations can no longer overlook the challenges created when the content is sprawled across silos and applications,” said Wayne Kurtzman, Research Vice President of Collaboration and Communities, IDC. “In addition to mitigating security and compliance risks, new ways of leveraging content drive better ways of finding needed content, create new insights, and become a strategic advantage. Box Hubs has the potential to transform how enterprises organize their information and drive workflows.”

Effortlessly Create Intelligent Content Portals with Box Hubs

With the volume of information being generated and shared across global organizations increasing exponentially, it’s critical for enterprises to have scalable and secure tools for curating and publishing content, without requiring IT resources or demanding hours of training for users. With Box Hubs, users will be able to:

• Create a Hub in minutes, without the help of IT or an Admin, by simply selecting the desired files and publishing it with a few clicks, no code required;
• Customize Hubs by adding header images and icons, descriptive information, and an intuitive content layout;
• Effortlessly add existing content in Box to a Hub – organizing it into easy-to-read content playlists, and publishing it without needing to move or copy the files from their current folders;
• Trust that all content published in a Hub will always retain Box’s enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance capabilities, so that content is only ever available to its intended audience;
• Access all available Hubs via the new Box Hubs gallery, to seamlessly find desired content and eliminate the need to search through numerous folders;
• Leverage robust search functionality within specific Hubs so they can find the information they need faster;
• View built-in insights at the Hub and file-level to better understand the trends behind how their content is performing and how their audience is engaging with their Hubs.

In addition to these core features, Box Hubs with Box AI will enable users to leverage powerful generative AI capabilities to unlock the value of vast amounts of data stored within their organization. Customers will be able to ask questions across all of the content curated in a Hub to extract key information, summarize complex concepts, and compare specific files. Additionally, users will be able to generate new content based on information in a Hub, to ensure that creating new, relevant content is easy and seamless.

Box Hubs will deliver a simple way for enterprises to securely curate, organize, and distribute content for every department and team, including:

• HR teams will be able to publish a Hub with the company handbook, 401K plans, updated diversity and inclusion resources, and more, so that all employees can easily find information and stay up-to-date on company policies;
• Sales enablement teams will be able to organize a Hub with the corporate pitch, buyer personas, and discovery questions, so that the sales team can engage with more buyers and grow revenue;
• Brand teams will be able to create a Hub with ready-made templates, images, and logos to keep employees and agencies aligned while strengthening the company’s overall brand recognition;
• Marketing teams will be able to curate a Hub with objectives, goals, positioning statements, and competitive analyses, allowing hybrid teams to work seamlessly while measuring ROI on marketing initiatives;
• Product teams will be able to build a department Hub with the product roadmap, org charts, and quarterly planning processes to enable products to be delivered to customers on-time.

Box AI to Enter Beta

Earlier this year, Box introduced Box AI, a new suite of capabilities that will natively integrate advanced AI models into the Box Content Cloud, bringing Box’s enterprise-grade standards for security, compliance, and privacy to this breakthrough technology.

The first two Box AI capabilities, which embed technology from OpenAI to enable users to create content in Box Notes and to ask questions of specific documents when you’re previewing them in Box, will begin rolling out to Box Enterprise Plus plan users in beta this November. Initially, users will have access to 20 queries per month, with 2,000 additional queries available on a company level. Over time, additional queries will be available for purchase for larger scale use cases.

Partnership helps customers automate enterprise translation workflows and deliver multilingual digital experiences that drive global growth

Founded by the former leaders of Gmail and Google Calendar, Relay.app delivers an innovative combination of AI assistance and human-in-the-loop collaboration.

Today Relay.app announced the general availability of their workflow automation product, which combines AI assistance, human-in-the-loop collaboration, and a robust multiplayer experience to help teams save time on repeated tasks. Relay.app was founded by Jacob Bank, who was previously the Co-Founder and CEO of Timeful (acquired by Google in 2015) and then a Director of Product Management at Google. The founding team includes the product, design, and engineering leaders from Gmail and Google Calendar.

The problem that Relay.app is solving - streamlining workflows across tools - is more urgent than ever, as the average company now uses 130 SaaS applications¹. As apps proliferate, the workflow automation market is rapidly growing and expected to reach $78b by 2030². Existing players have excelled in automations that trigger in one tool and take an action in another. But the advances in AI have created an opportunity to automate a broader set of use cases. Relay.app enables users to add AI extraction, summarization, or text generation to any step in a workflow. Crucially, Relay.app also includes a human-in-the-loop ability to double check the output of automated steps.

"While AI tools are becoming more capable by the day, human judgment and context play a key role in many workflows. Relay.app gives users the best of both worlds: AI to eliminate the busywork and a human touch where it counts", shared Relay's Founder and CEO, Jacob Bank.

Relay's early customers include fast growing companies like Ramp, Skyflow, Warp, Motion, Lumos, and Tavus.

The company also announced $3.1m in additional funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

"The team's impressive background at Google, where they shaped the future of email and calendar tools, is a testament to their expertise and technical prowess," said Kristina Shen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. "With their unique insight into how users collaborate with AI, the Relay.app team is primed to reshape the landscape of productivity tools."