ViewTrade, the force that powers fintech, and Finequities, an innovative social trading technology firm, today announced that Finequities has chosen ViewTrade as the technology partner for its AI-powered social trading platform. Finequities will use ViewTrade's cutting-edge trading solutions to help investors put their investment decisions into action.

Launched in June 2023 as a trading platform that allows investors to trade in combination with community-derived sentiment, Finequities leverages artificial intelligence to connect investors and create a collaborative environment where they can learn from more experienced traders and replicate their strategies. The platform currently provides access to all listed US equities and ETFs and supports several cryptocurrencies, all with no monthly fees, no minimum account deposit, and with zero-commission trading.

"ViewTrade is the perfect technology provider to bring our trading ideas to life," said Finequities CEO Santiago Andrade. "Early on we discovered that ViewTrade shared our commitment to help users trade with innovative technology and powerful solutions, and we have been further gratified to see how ViewTrade continues to support clients beyond the signup phase, acting as a true partner in implementing solutions as ViewTrade provides industry-leading technology and services."

"The whole world is talking about potential applications for AI, and Finequities is innovating in this area of technology with a goal of delivering users an efficient and effective platform with an integrated community of members," said Barry Bernstein, ViewTrade COO, Head of Business Development and Managing Director – Technology Services. "We enjoy working alongside the Finequities team, bringing together the vision and technology that will continue to innovate for years to come."

ViewTrade provides technology, support and brokerage services that enable clients to quickly launch or enhance a retail investing experience with leading-edge solutions. ViewTrade is dedicated to delivering business-to-business-to-customer services to new and established financial services providers, embedded fintechs and other firms pursuing digital transformation around the world.

Edgio’s Uplynk Streaming Solution to Significantly Simplify Vermantia’s Delivery of Live Events

Edgio, Inc. (Nasdaq: EGIO), a platform of choice for speed, security and simplicity at the edge, today announced a reseller partnership with Vermantia, a global provider of omni-channel content solutions for gaming, and betting operators worldwide. The collaboration supports Vermantia’s custom-built, end-to-end streaming solutions for live racing, sports events, virtual sports, and number games.

As part of the partnership, Vermantia will utilize Edgio’s Uplynk solution in its channel production to significantly simplify the delivery of live events, broadcast/OTT, and free ad-supported TV (FAST) syndication, allowing customers to expand their reach while optimizing resources. Powered by a secure global edge network specifically designed for the unique demands of media, Uplynk ensures an exceptional viewing experience for audiences worldwide.

“We are excited to be collaborating with Edgio. This partnership marks a significant improvement for our streaming services, as we continue to provide our valued customers with tailored content solutions and custom channels for live racing, sports events, virtual sports and number games,” said Menelaos Ladopoulos, CTO of Vermantia. “Through our association with Edgio, we aim to enhance our end-to-end streaming capabilities, leveraging Edgio’s unique technology. We are confident this partnership will empower us to meet the evolving needs of our clients across EMEA, shaping exceptional streaming experiences.”

With an impressive track record of handling hundreds of thousands of live events, including global sporting events, Edgio’s Uplynk solution has achieved remarkable milestones. In 2022 alone, Uplynk generated 2.4 billion event views, 3.3 billion hours of streamed video, and more than 220 million hours of advertising.

Through the partnership Vermantia will also provide its operator partners Edgio’s Application and Media portfolio, with particular emphasis on next-gen Web CDN and Edgio’s holistic web application security solutions.

“Edgio is thrilled to be developing our relationship with Vermantia and supporting them in building solutions across EMEA in the next era of streaming, where technology and business innovation will see concurrent viewing numbers surge,” said Emma Whitmore, Group VP, EMEA Edgio.

With Invoca and Google Cloud, ensure media budgets are allocated towards campaigns that maximize conversions and increase revenue over the phone

Invoca, a recognized leader in conversation intelligence AI, is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace. The partnership marks another milestone in the growing go-to-market collaboration between Invoca and Google, as joint customers rely on this partnership to power more effective media strategies and drive revenue growth.

By connecting the online-to-offline buyer journeys, from Google searches and YouTube clicks to revenue-generating phone calls, businesses use Invoca and Google Cloud to invest in channels that drive higher quality leads and more conversions. According to a recent Google survey, 85% of marketers say they want to increase the quality of their leads. Further, at Google's Think Lead Gen conference in November 2022, Google predicted that measuring offline conversion touchpoints would be essential in 2023. 

"With greater economic uncertainty, marketers must defend their spend, optimize their budgets and measure the impact of their media dollars," said Cathie Frazzini, VP Strategic Sales and Partnerships, Invoca. "Now listed on Google Cloud Marketplace, Invoca is empowering marketers with even more ways to prove media dollars aren't wasted on the wrong campaigns. This demonstrates marketing effectiveness and accelerates time to value for marketing teams. It's a win-win for companies challenged to do more with less." 

"As a part of their digital transformation strategies, many enterprises are seeking solutions that help them better understand consumers along their purchasing journey," said Dai Vu, Managing Director, Cloud Marketplace & ISV GTM Programs, Google Cloud. "With its solution now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, Invoca is enabling revenue-generating teams to create better buying experiences, drive more leads, and close more deals."

Powerful Marketing Outcomes from One Consolidated Source

Businesses can now consolidate billing of any investments they're making within Google Cloud Marketplace solutions, all while experiencing a simpler procurement process when including Invoca conversation intelligence. Cost-related benefits include:

• Accelerated purchasing: No procurement or vendor setup required. Access pre-negotiated standard contracts.
• Consolidated cloud spend: Single billing and vendor management, increased negotiating power, and flexible invoicing terms.
• Leverage discounting mechanics: Use existing Google Cloud commitments.

This partnership makes it easier for Google Cloud customers to access their Invoca integrations with Google Ads, Search Ads 360, Google Analytics 4, Google BigQuery, and Google Campaign Manager.

Flywheel Digital, a leading digital commerce company for enterprise brands, announced today the appointment of Allysun Lundy as Senior Vice President of Media. Lundy comes to Flywheel from Publicis Groupe, where she served in a similar position.

As SVP of Media, Lundy will be responsible for the advancement of Flywheel’s expanding digital capabilities, internal team development and client growth. This comes at a time when the company is seeing record growth as brands around the world look towards retail media to increase sales and visibility.

“We are incredibly excited to have Allysun join the Flywheel team,” said Alex McCord, CEO of Enterprise, Ascential Digital Commerce. “Allysun is a known industry thought leader who deeply understands the nuances of winning in an omnichannel world. Her addition to our senior leadership team will drive even greater Digital Commerce success for Flywheel’s portfolio of industry-leading brands.”

Allysun is an experienced commerce professional who has worked on the agency side for her whole career, partnering with CPG companies to develop award-winning omnichannel programs. She most recently led Retail Media Strategy at Publicis, focused on retailer partnerships, capability-building and thought leadership. Her management experience with high-level client budgets and overseeing cross-functional, geographically diverse teams within highly-matrixed organizations, allows her to bring a unique perspective and skill to become an effective leader at Flywheel.

“I’m thrilled to join the Flywheel team at such a pivotal time and excited for the laser focus that the company has on driving growth for clients,” Lundy said. “I’m looking forward to working with such an experienced and engaging team, to create even more opportunities to provide unparalleled growth for our clients.”

The appointment of Lundy to this position is just the latest news from Flywheel, with more announcements to come throughout the rest of 2023.

Deepdub GO lets creators use their own voice for dubbing in 65 languages and first-of-its-kind emotion-prompting AI allows control over vocal emotional expression

Deepdub, the leading AI-based audiovisual dubbing and language localization company, announced today the launch of Deepdub GO, a new AI-powered audio-video localization and creation platform for businesses, advertising agencies, online learning platforms, and content creators. Deepdub initially developed its proprietary AI technology for the entertainment industry and has collaborated with Hollywood studios on dozens of film and television projects, including shows that are currently streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime. With the launch of Deepdub GO, the company is now bringing high-quality and scalable video localization to a wide range of industries for the first time.

Localization of video content by dubbing creates an engaging and immersive viewer experience and can make content accessible to a wider audience. However due to long turnaround times, the complexity of the process and the high costs associated with dubbing, the practice has been mostly limited to the entertainment industry.

"The vast majority of content today can only be viewed by a tiny sliver of the world's population," said Ofir Krakowski, CEO and co-founder of Deepdub. "There's tremendous value that can be unlocked by bringing educational, business and human interest content to a global audience. While auto-generated subtitles help, they aren't engaging, aren't accessible to many, and are entirely unsuited for many forms of content like, for example, fitness videos."

The new Deepdub Go platform delivers unparalleled voice quality and emotional resonance. It's equipped with human-like sound, first-of-its-kind emotion-prompting and voice-guiding technology, and a robust composer for high-quality voice cloning. The professional platform's capabilities extend to editing voice characteristics, languages, and translations, in addition to other powerful editing features such as controlling duration and word count for lip-sync adjustment. In addition to cloning the original voice, users can choose from thousands of platform voices across 65 languages to match any style.

Deepdub GO gives content creators fine-grained control over the emotional expressivity of the generated audio through "emotion prompting" a novel approach that utilizes a custom large language model (LLM), allowing users to steer the performance via textual prompts. Additionally, the platform enables control through "voice guiding" a technique developed by Deepdub to achieve theatrical-grade results for Hollywood movies. Users can provide a voice recording to act as a guide for the desired emotional expressivity of the AI-generated audio.

"For the first time ever, professional-level dubbing is available for any type of content, whether it's a corporate training video, a university course, or an influencer's video," said Ofir Krakowski. "Deepdub GO is an enabler of global storytelling, allowing content creators to resonate with their audiences in a deeper, more personal way. With our studio platform, creators can amplify the potential reach of every piece of content beyond traditional geographical and linguistic boundaries."

Users simply upload their videos to the Deepdub GO platform, choose the video style and desired languages, and the video is available for download shortly. The end-to-end process includes automatic transcription, translation, voice generation, and audio mixing. Users have full control over every step in the process, and can make edits and adjustments according to their needs. Deepdub GO is also available as an API, enabling integration into existing tools and automated workflows.

Recognized for High Quality Content Management Solutions, Deep Expertise and Exceptional Customer Experiences

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A., an award-winning content services solutions provider, today announced it has achieved the Premier Solution Provider distinction – Hyland’s highest level of partnership – by providing premier solutions through a content management center of excellence. The company was also honored with competency status for its low code application development with Hyland’s OnBase content services platform.

The Hyland Global Partner Community is an exclusive network of more than 300 Hyland partners. It provides expertise and hands-on support for Hyland’s content services product portfolio, and the complementary technologies that make up automation solutions. The software company’s Competency program recognizes partners’ expertise in demonstrating, selling, implementing and supporting Hyland solutions based on industries, capabilities and solutions.

“We are extremely pleased with this recognition and our collaborative work with Hyland as we meet our customers where they are on their digital transformation journeys,” said Sam Errigo, President and CEO, Konica Minolta. “Our eleven-year partnership has enabled our teams to collectively customize Intelligent Information Management solutions that accelerate value creation and deliver extraordinary customer experiences, desired business outcomes and innovation at scale.”

“Hyland’s Solution Provider program features partners that meet high standards of delivering quality solutions and alignment with Hyland. For the highest level of partnership, we congratulate Konica Minolta as a Premier Partner,” said Eric Miller, Associate Vice President, Hyland Channel. “We’re also proud to recognize Konica Minolta for achieving its low code application development competency status for OnBase as they continue to drive their business forward and create even better experiences for their customers.”

Global Consultancy Provides CEO Advisory Services Across Strategic Communications, PR, and Marketing

Bevel, the top communications consultancy for tech and venture capital, today announced its acquisition by Avenue Z, founded by digital visionary Jeffrey Herzog, to build the first strategic communications unicorn. Herzog, previously founder of iCrossing, acquired by Hearst Media in 2010 for $450M, has a vision for the convergence of public relations and digital marketing with a singular focus on growth.

“In today’s fragmented digital ecosystem, building a category-leading brand requires integrated messages across platforms. By leveraging influential storytelling, digital media and data, we’ll drive brand visibility, build stakeholder engagement and provide clients with measured ROI,” said Herzog.

“I’m excited to work with Jeff Herzog to build the first digital communications unicorn,” said Jessica Schaefer, Founder and CEO of Bevel. “Our clients are demanding influencer relations, SEO, content marketing, video and social media services – 360° campaigns that drive influence and impact.”

“The capital, experience and team that Jeff brings building global firms will make our growth unstoppable,” Schaefer adds.

With a passion for shaping the future of technology through communications, Bevel was founded by venture-capital communications veteran Jessica Schaefer, looking to reimagine the role of public relations for companies on the cutting-edge. By leveraging her previous financial experience running communications for Point72, she launched a new business model that combines the power of influential storytelling with the analytical mindset of a start-up. Through the company's results-driven and VC-like approach, Bevel has attracted a notable roster of clients, including: Acorns, Better.com, BlockTower Capital, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Dave.com, Greycroft, Public.com; RX3 Ventures, a consumer-focused investment fund backed by Aaron Rodgers; and, Sundance, the largest independent film festival globally, among others.

Bevel has historically excelled at advising private and public company CEOs on media affairs, reputation management and crisis communications. WIth new capabilities from Avenue Z, Bevel will now offer greater influence through Search & Social Media. The company is building its strategic advisory services to help accelerate the growth of start-ups from $20M in valuation with the goal of building them into multi-billion dollar category leaders.

Jessica Schaefer will join the board of The Avenue Z Network. Avenue Z is actively expanding and plans to acquire firms across digital marketing, branding, analytics and technology.

Enables worry-free AI image licensing for enterprise customers and continues to compensate hundreds of thousands of artists through Shutterstock's AI-specific Contributor Fund

Shutterstock, Inc. , a leading global creative platform offering high-quality content and full-service creative workflow solutions for transformative brands, digital media and marketing companies, today announced its offering to provide Enterprise customers with full indemnification for the license and use of generative AI images on its platform. Shutterstock will fulfill indemnification requests on demand via human review with the intent to protect its customers against potential claims related to their use of generative AI images created and licensed on shutterstock.com.

"We're at an inflection point in the use of generative AI technology as business professionals are seeking more assurance around their rights to legally use AI-generated content, and creators of original content want to ensure their work is fairly licensed for use," said John Lapham, General Counsel at Shutterstock. "We have always sought to manage risk for our customers and are uniquely positioned to bring a commercially viable image generator to market and indemnify its outputs, because of our relationship with artists and intimate understanding of the complexities of licensing."

Previously unveiled during the Shutterstock Showcase, Shutterstock led the market, first offering this assurance to a global technology customer using an image generated on the Shutterstock platform for their worldwide virtual developer conference in May 2023. Shortly after the company indemnified images for a leading cable network's upcoming television series. The company is now expanding it to all enterprise customers on demand.

"This is a critical advancement, not just for our platform, but for the industry as creatives and business professionals alike can use the AI content generated on our platform for any purpose, whether it's commercial or personal, without worrying about copyright infringement or ethical issues," said Jeff Cunning, Vice President of Product at Shutterstock. "We're excited to play a leading role in shaping how generative capabilities can be leveraged ethically, safely and in more creative ways than ever. We feel it's a crucial step towards protecting our customers and our artists."

While AI-generated images created by customers currently are not reviewed and vetted en masse on the Shutterstock platform, through this new offering exclusive to the Shutterstock platform, customers are able to license AI-generated content under the same protections that exist in their current agreement. That review will ensure that a customer using AI-generated content will not create any additional risk to that customer or their clients.

This indemnification offering is the latest in several strategic steps Shutterstock has taken as one of the leading innovators bringing AI to creative production, having recently launched its AI Design Assistant and DALL·E-powered AI Image Generator—Shutterstock's text-to-image technology that converts prompts into larger-than-life, ethically created visuals ready for licensing. The Shutterstock AI image generator is trained on hundreds of millions of ethically-sourced assets, including from Shutterstock with the goal of ensuring customers can generate and license new assets with complete commercial safety while at the same time protecting and compensating the artists who are behind the content that trained the models. Shutterstock launched its first-in-kind Contributor Fund in October 2022 which, to date, has compensated hundreds of thousands of artists for the role their content IP has played in training Shutterstock's generative technology, with anticipated payments to millions more, and has provided artists with ongoing royalties tied to licensing activity for newly generated assets.

Shutterstock intends to continue to invest, innovate and engage in strategic long-term partnerships that amplify the value and impact of its high-quality content library, enriched with vast metadata, that leads the industry in size, diversity and annotation—making it unrivaled for training AI capabilities. To date, Shutterstock has partnered with NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, LG and other leaders in the tech industry to develop foundational generative AI tools and standards for creators across 3D, images and text.