This initiative is designed to help underrepresented publishers maximize inventory value

DoubleVerify, a leading software platform for digital media measurement, data and analytics, today announced a partnership with Group Black, one of the largest collectives of Black-owned media and diverse creators. This collaboration is part of DV’s initiative to help underrepresented publishers maximize inventory value. In the first phase of the partnership, optimization efforts enabled DV and Group Black to open up 14.8% more of Group Black’s overall inventory and reduce blocking due to site classification by 98.6%.

Increasingly, advertisers want to ensure that their brand values are reflected in their advertising strategies. Through this initiative, based on work with Group Black, DV plans to partner with underrepresented publishers and content creators on technical standards and to champion best practices for incorporating values-based marketing into their approach to brand suitability.

“Our goal is to create transparency across the ecosystem, driving ROI for advertisers and yield for publishers,” said Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify. “Our partnership with Group Black, through this initiative, will enable both parties to achieve their goals and for brands to connect with previously untapped audiences.”

Some of the ways DV will work with publishers, networks and advertisers as part of this initiative include:

• Optimization Analysis: Providing an optimization analysis of inventory performance to guide strategy and identify opportunities.
• Classification Coverage: Working to ensure publisher partners have the most granular page-level classification coverage regardless of impression volume.
• Client Advocacy: Working with advertiser clients to enable them to make decisions regarding their brand safety and suitability settings that do not limit reach.
• Technical Partnership: Working with individual publishers to enable them to optimize ad server setup and DV tag configuration for maximum see-through rate (STR).

“Historically Black-owned media and content creators have been marginalized, leaving them at a disadvantage when it comes to monetization,” says Kerel Cooper, President of Advertising at Group Black. “Through our partnership with DoubleVerify, we are excited to work together to break this cycle, ultimately creating more opportunities for Black publishers while providing maximum value for advertisers looking to take advantage of this optimal inventory.”

DV is committed to helping brands maximize reach, promoting brand safety and suitability all while supporting diverse publications and content that align with their values. This initiative is only offered in the US at launch but will be expanded internationally over time.

Theta Lake Wins Best Compliance Product at UC Awards and Recognized in two Gartner® Hype Cycles™ 2023

Theta Lake, Inc., a recognized leader in modern compliance and security solutions for unified communications (UC), is proud to receive top honors as the winner of the Best Compliance Product and a High Commendation for both Best Use of AI and UC Leader of the Year, recognizing Devin Redmond, Co-Founder and CEO. In addition, Theta Lake was nominated for Most Innovative Product.

Theta Lake was also recently recognized in the new Gartner® Digital Communications Governance (DCG) market category that is aligned to compliance for unified communication tools. In fact, Theta Lake is a Sample Vendor in two Gartner® "Hype Cycles™, both the Storage and Data Protection and Data Security Hype Cycles, where “Digital Communications Governance solutions provide methods to monitor and enforce corporate governance and regulatory compliance across a growing number of communications tools available to employees”(1).

Theta Lake stands out among other vendors as the only company in the DCG market category with certified integrations purpose-built for modern unified communication and collaboration tools, deep UC partnerships, and direct financial backing from the leaders in UC including Zoom, RingCentral, Cisco Investments, Salesforce Ventures, and executives from Microsoft, as well as tier 1 venture firms like Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Theta Lake is a company and solution that customers can trust to deliver. To learn more, read our blog “Digital Communications Governance, What It Is, How Theta Lake Fits and What You Need To Know”.

“These accolades and recognition serve as a testament to Theta Lake's unwavering commitment to providing innovation, compliance expertise, fostering deep partnership relationships, and delivering exceptional value to customers. From day 1 in late 2017 we’ve built a deep technology company around the market needs for comprehensive unified communication and collaboration focused compliance and security. With some of the largest, most regulated customers in over 7 countries, we help improve compliance posture, reduce fines, and, importantly, maximize the return on investment for their communications and collaboration platforms,” said Devin Redmond, Co-Founder and CEO, Theta Lake. “A fulfilling part of the recognition and the value we feel we deliver is that our customers give us a ‘100 Percent Would Recommend’ rating and a 4.9 out of 5 overall rating on Gartner Peer Insights.”

“Theta Lake’s exceptional work in the Best Compliance Product category has truly set the industry standard, and we are thrilled to see their accomplishments acknowledged at UC Awards 2023,” said David Dungay, UC Today Editor in Chief and Host of the event. 

Process automation leader delivers practical value for professional low-code developers.

Appian, today announced key elements of its expanded strategy and roadmap for generative AI in the Appian Platform for process automation. Appian's focus is on democratising access to AI technology in order to unlock productivity gains for developers, and the company's strategy centres on delivering secure and reliable private AI to protect customers' data.

"Appian incorporates AI in a practical manner that delivers real customer value," said Michael Beckley, CTO and Founder, Appian. "Our vision is embodied by the Appian AI Copilot, which uses generative AI to accelerate low-code development and is supported by a family of intuitive, low-code AI capabilities."

Appian recently announced OpenAI/ChatGPT low-code integration and that ChatGPT is trained on Appian's declarative SAIL expression language. Appian also unveiled the Appian AI Skill Designer, a simple and powerful way for organisations to create custom AI machine learning models that don't require giving their sensitive data to a public AI platform.

Today, Appian delivered two new AI plug-ins to the Appian AppMarket:

• Appian Azure OpenAI Connected System: Appian increases freedom of choice for customers wanting to use cutting edge generative AI in their business processes. With this low-code connector, your business can seamlessly connect to Azure's OpenAI Service and combine generative AI with enterprise-grade data security governance. 
• Appian Pinecone Connected System: Using the new low-code integration to Pinecone's vector database, users can query their Appian document knowledge base and retrieve intelligent results based on the semantic meaning of their question. Used in tandem with OpenAI, this integration enables users to chat with their private data and receive contextually relevant information from generative AI.

Expanded AI roadmap.

The Appian Platform is built on an enterprise-ready AI architecture that is delivering real business value today. Our key architectural components make it easy to leverage AI, including our patented SAIL and Data Fabric, our AI Skill Designer for building private AI services, and our ability to easily incorporate AI in end-to-end process automations.

Appian is continuing to bring innovative generative AI capabilities to market in upcoming releases, including:

• Instant generation of digitised forms from PDFs through AI document understanding.
• Appian is combining the power of large language models (LLM) with additional AI training of our SAIL architecture and our document understanding capabilities to develop a new generative AI capability for instant understanding and creation of new applications from existing PDF documents. 
• Self-service analytics through AI-powered queries of the Appian Data Fabric with natural language.
• 94% of new Appian customers have adopted our revolutionary Data Fabric. Appian is combining our Data Fabric with generative AI and natural language understanding to create a revolutionary capability for self-service analytics. This will empower every user to discover insights from the Appian Data Fabric to improve business operations.
• AI-generated workflows assembled on-the-fly based on natural language prompts.
• Appian is training LLM and AI to understand the core nature of workflow and process patterns to support AI-generated workflows. This will empower users to build workflow orchestrations with natural language prompts, further breaking down barriers in human-machine collaboration.
• AI-enabled out-of-the-box solutions.
• Appian already delivered AI-generated RFI creation within its Government Acquisition suite and Case Management suite of solutions. New and existing Appian solutions will be imbued with AI capabilities.

"Appian believes low-code and AI are a perfect match," said Michael Beckley, CTO and Founder, Appian. "Appian's AI Copilot demonstrates the natural advantages of this union by making its suggestions inside low-code design tools. Low-code is the perfect medium for AI to express application designs while ensuring humans can easily understand and refine AI creations through an intuitive and visual design environment."

Appian looks forward to releasing expanded generative AI features in our Appian 23.3 release, scheduled for August 2023. Appian intends to continue investing in these AI capabilities, with new features and capabilities coming out in our quarterly release cadence through 2023 and beyond. AI is a core principle in our product management philosophy that will drive all aspects of our product designs as we continue to innovate for continuous customer value.

AdPlayer.Pro has appointed its new Chief Executive Officer.

AdPlayer.Pro, a global provider of outstream video ad solutions has announced the appointment of Natalie Romankina as its new Chief Executive Officer, who previously held the CBDO role in the company.

According to the official announcement, given her 15+ years of professional experience, as well as her deep knowledge of advertising technology, the appointment of Natalie Romankina is a part of the company’s strategy to strengthen AdPlayer.Pro’s position as the leader in the online video ad tech industry.

“Having been with AdPlayer.Pro since its founding, and all through the past 7 years of success, I couldn’t be happier to take a new, key role in the company’s management. And I’m definitely looking forward to enhancing its vision and strategy in order to drive the company’s business forward,” Ms Romankina said.

Namely, some of the strategic plans, already in the works, include the further upgrade of the functional backbone of the AdPlayer.Pro white label ad server solution.

According to Natalie Romankina, the key idea behind the upgrade is to expand the flexibility of the offered technology further, so that each customer can adjust it precisely to its business needs.

The dilemma of what’s next - how to allocate resources, adjust pricing, invest in product - is going to get easier with real-time insights from employees who are closest to customers.

Groopit, the enterprise SaaS platform that makes it easy to crowdsource insights from employees, today launches new Salesforce capabilities that help leaders determine what’s next using insights from frontline sellers.

Business leaders are constantly determining what’s next - how to allocate resources, adjust pricing, improve customer experience, and invest in products. But by the time you have data to support your plans, it's too late. Decisions have already been made, opportunities have been missed, deals have been lost, customers are frustrated, and competitors have moved ahead.

The future of “what’s next” starts by adding Groopit to Salesforce. Groopit delivers the critical business insights needed to inform decisions from Salesforce, directly to your department and to you. For the first time, you can harness the collective wisdom of your frontline employees within Salesforce, guaranteeing that these invaluable insights reach you and the key decision-makers across your organization. Simply install Groopit from AppExchange into your instance of Salesforce and you’ll have the quantitative data you need from employees who are closest to customers. Insights at your fingertips, in real-time, making it easy to determine and articulate what’s next.

Groopit provides business leaders with extreme agility, speed, and scale. As business needs change and evolve, you’ll redefine the insights you need and get them fast - without waiting for Salesforce configuration. The enterprise system is built on top of a Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, so it will power hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of your employees at a time, updating data in real-time. Today, enterprises like Home Depot, Siemens, and Guidant Financial, rely on Groopit to inform their most strategic initiatives with real-time insights from the frontline.

Key features and capabilities include:

• Groopit Insight Feeds. Groopit delivers precisely the right insights, from frontline employees working in Salesforce, directly to you and the appropriate decision-makers across corporate disciplines. Receive insights from Salesforce and easily consume them in Slack, Teams, email, or wherever you work.
• Groopit Templates. New and updated templates for the most common use cases provide precisely the right data surrounding each insight. Templates include competitive pricing intelligence, customer experience breakages, field site visit learnings, new product reactions, operational issues, positive customer quotes, wins, losses, and more.
• Groopit Integrations. 94% of sales organizations plan to consolidate their tech stack in the next 12 months.* Groopit makes that possible by establishing an underlying insight sharing engine that works across disciplines, consolidating and eliminating data silos that exist in discipline specific systems.
• Groopit Quick Start. Eliminate Salesforce configuration wait time. With Groopit, business leaders define the insights needed from frontline sellers without waiting on Salesforce configuration or support. You’ll get the precise data needed, fast, and everyone, including Salesforce Administrators, saves time.
• Groopit Sharing. According to Salesforce Research, 69% of sales professionals agree their job is harder and reducing administrative work is key. Groopit radically simplifies how reps contribute insights with a few quick taps, in less than a minute, and from wherever they work - Salesforce, Teams, Slack, web, and mobile.

“Groopit transforms business problem solving, just like smartphones transformed photography – both delivering high-quality, rapid views and outcomes that were previously out of reach”, says Tammy Savage, CEO & Co-founder of Groopit. “With Groopit, leaders decide the vantage point from which they approach a problem, immediately receive data from employees to form a high-fidelity image of that problem, and can pivot immediately to explore new angles. It transforms how leaders are understanding competitors and improving customer experiences, products, and operations.

FAIR powered by Aible leverages the power of generative AI to provide deep insights through a proprietary conversational interface

Rackspace Technology^® (NASDAQ: RXT) — a leading end-to-end, multicloud solutions company, announced a partnership with Aible to enable enterprise-scale data analysis and data storytelling while providing deep insights through a proprietary conversational interface. Foundry for AI by Rackspace (FAIR™) is dedicated to accelerating the secure, responsible, and sustainable adoption of AI and data solutions in enterprises across all industries, and through this partnership will be powered by Aible.

"Our partnership with FAIR is an opportunity to collaborate across multiple channels, scaling up the power of AI-first data analysis," Arijit Sengupta, Founder & CEO of Aible. "Combining our proprietary augmented data analysis and storytelling capabilities with an intuitive conversational interface for enterprise data, Aible offers a unique solution to FAIR. With FAIR's enterprise-grade security and our secure AI platform capabilities, we will combine the best of both AI technologies for a sustainable and secure AI solution ready for enterprise use."

Aible is the only enterprise AI solution that guarantees impact in 30 days. The AI-first analytics solution answers business questions by automating all steps of the analysis process - from data discovery, data preparation, asking millions of queries automatically, statistical analysis, and synthesis of insights into a business summary. Aible scalably uses an automated process to evaluate the output of the generative AI to detect and prevent hallucinations where the AI simply makes up facts. Aible conducts use-case and generative AI model-specific prompt augmentation at scale that enables business users to have far better experiences with generative AI on their data. Every user interaction improves the model output.

"At FAIR, we aim to combine the transformative power of AI with our exceptional skills and services to create AI solutions that deliver meaningful business outcomes for our customers," said Srini Koushik, Rackspace CTO and Global Lead for FAIR. "Collaborating with Aible will help us enable more enterprise use cases by integrating Structured data into Generative AI solutions and streamline the LLMOps implementations that ensure the integrity of the Supply Chain of AI data within an organization. This partnership is a testament to our commitment to Open Innovation to deliver differentiated customer outcomes through partnerships with industry leaders.”

FAIR powered by Aible will be featured at two upcoming industry conferences:

August 7-9 - Ai4, Las Vegas (Aible Booth #306)

August 29-31 - Google Cloud Next, San Francisco (Rackspace Technology/FAIR Booth # 217)

Foundry for AI by Rackspace (FAIR)

FAIR is a groundbreaking global practice dedicated to advancing business transformation, improving customer experience, increasing the quality of service, and accelerating value creation through the secure and pragmatic use of AI technologies. FAIR has identified over 500+ use cases across multiple industries and is working on several first-of-a-kind implementations for our customers across the globe. FAIR provides three unique services to help lean into the transformative power of AI:

●     FAIR Ideate: An interactive and collaborative ideation workshop that helps organizations uncover actionable use cases for AI with defined business impacts. AI readiness diagnostics provide critical considerations for successful AI adoption.

●     FAIR Incubate: An agile and iterative program that co-creates an enterprise’s first generative AI solution. It establishes the technology stack and assesses the viability of AI, ensuring seamless integration into organizational processes.

●     FAIR Industrialize: A systematic effort to transform the AI solution into a product, implementing governance, defining metrics, and optimizing the AI model and Distributed Cloud Infrastructure for continuous improvement.

RAU Capital led the funding round as the Digital Out of Home category continues to see record growth in the AdTech industry

Beeyond Media, a leading programmatic Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising demand-side platform (DSP), today announced the close of a $10M Seed round led by Ricardo Uribe of RAU Capital and Beeyond Media board member. The latest funding will be used to scale the Beeyond business in the United States and Latin America and help Beeyond Media expand their vast connected inventory in other markets throughout 2024. This latest round of funding brings total dollars raised to $12.5M. 

Beeyond Media is offering a solution that enhances campaign reach with their unique approach to DOOH, that merges programmatic technology with a layer of curated services to maximize the results and return on ad spend of large campaigns for brands. The technology company excels in delivering high-quality out of home (OOH) advertising across a wide range of digital screens for maximum advertising impact. This seed investment will play a vital role in financing ongoing campaigns and enabling the business to grow its team in the US. In 2022 Beeyond Media's sales increased 12X and the business projects a 10X increase from the previous year.

"As the DOOH industry grows and we continue to expand our business, the ongoing support from our investors is increasingly valuable," said Alejandro Donzis, CEO and co-founder of Beeyond Media. "The opportunity in digital advertising is massive and Beeyond is demonstrating to the industry that there is a superior way to manage DOOH campaigns, and our growing partnerships and client base serve as proof of our success. Together, we are advancing towards a future where we redefine excellence in the industry."  

"Beeyond Media has exceeded expectations over the last year," said Ricardo Uribe, investor at RAU Capital and Beeyond Media board member. "We believe the company is strategically positioned to stand out as a provider of a highly valuable global solution in an industry growing at double-digit rates year over year." 

Beeyond Media has an inventory of over 600,000 devices and screens including billboards, street furniture, airport media and more spanning across 17 countries. The company is on a mission to become the premier global DOOH company in a growing market. Most recently, the company announced a strategic partnership with Place Exchange, a supply-side platform (SSP) for programmatic OOH, extending Beeyond Media's extensive DOOH inventory. Earlier this year, the business launched its audience segmentation tool, Beeyond TrueReach, which sources data and information from leading providers, arming clients with the insights to execute highly effective and targeted DOOH campaigns.