The Mapbox Snowflake Native App enables Snowflake customers to unlock the value of addresses and geospatial data with simple SQL statements.

Mapbox, the leading location data platform for mobile and web applications, announced at Snowflake's annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2023, the availability of its new Snowflake Native App on Snowflake Marketplace. Snowflake customers can install and run the app within their Snowflake account, enabling data analysts and decision makers to use a variety of Mapbox geospatial services directly within the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Data analysis that would have previously required direct interaction with APIs can now be completed with simple SQL statements. Snowflake customers can use Mapbox to match addresses to geographic coordinates, translate raw coordinates to addresses, and aggregate data by geographic boundaries.

Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, announced that the Snowflake Native App Framework (public preview on AWS) is now available for developers to build and test apps natively in the Data Cloud with additional distribution and monetization capabilities in public preview soon. Snowflake Native Apps usher in a new era of data collaboration, enabling developers with the tools needed to create robust apps quickly with Snowflake's always-on availability and auto-scalability, all the while reducing security and privacy hurdles for customers because the apps run directly within the customers' Snowflake accounts. 

Snowflake Marketplace already has over 25 new Snowflake Native Apps available today, and over one hundred providers are currently developing apps that span multiple industries and use cases. "The Mapbox Snowflake Native App expands the availability of location services for thousands of customers on Snowflake Marketplace," said Chris Child, Senior Director of Product Management, Snowflake.

Mapbox is one of the leading organizations building in the Data Cloud, with a Snowflake Native App readily available to easily bring unique insights to end users and enabling them to unlock value with just a few clicks on Snowflake Marketplace. By being Powered by Snowflake,  Mapbox is able to create new revenue streams by distributing its app to thousands of Snowflake customers, without these customers having to move or expose their data.

"We are excited to join Snowflake in enabling easy access to location intelligence for the Snowflake community," said Sean Graber, Head of Search, Mapbox. "The Mapbox Snowflake Native App gives more customers, especially non-developers, easy ways to harness the business value of geospatial data, and all within the Snowflake Data Cloud environment where they are already building."

Clean up and convert location data
Users of the new Mapbox Snowflake Native App can tap into the Mapbox Geocoding API in order to validate and correct messy location data (such as long lists of non-standard addresses), convert text addresses and place names to geospatial coordinates, and translate raw location coordinates into text addresses. The Mapbox Geocoding API uses advanced batch processing to achieve lightning-fast processing time, even while processing hundreds of billions of queries daily. The Snowflake Native App also offers the ability to retain query results for future use.

Geocoding is valuable for companies in virtually every industry. In sectors like retail, telecommunications, healthcare, or insurance, providers can use geocoding to validate and analyze customer addresses to understand where clients are located to optimize service and  direct marketing campaigns. Trucking, shipping and logistics companies can use 'reverse geocoding' to convert geographic coordinates generated from automated tracking devices into addresses to better understand where assets or shipments are located and support compliance with regulations, such as the International Fuel Tax Agreement, which requires companies to pay fuel taxes based on travel time in various jurisdictions. 

Aggregate and analyze data according to geographic boundaries
The second major feature of the Mapbox Snowflake Native App is the ability to aggregate and analyze geospatial data using Mapbox Boundaries, an industry-leading dataset of 5 million polygons of administrative, political, statistical, postal, national, state, city, and locality borders across every country and at multiple levels of jurisdiction. Mapbox Boundaries polygons are edge-matched and topologically accurate – ensuring that there are no gaps or overlaps that introduce errors into analysis.

Using Mapbox Boundaries data, Snowflake users can use point-in-polygon analysis to aggregate geocoded data by jurisdiction, including multiple types of boundaries not included in typical geocoding products. Data analysts can identify and report on insights by aggregating data to various administrative or statistical levels. Sales teams can assess territories or the distribution of customers. Political organizations can aggregate address data by federal or state legislative districts to inform fundraising and other analytics.

Study finds marketers who leverage always-on attribution and real-time, inflight optimization drive up to 11x greater media efficiency

InMarket, a leader in 360-degree marketing intelligence and real-time advertising, today released their new study, Getting Smart About Ad Waste, in collaboration with the CMO Council. The study revealed that brands using InMarket's advanced attribution technology, including real-time inflight optimization, can achieve up to an 11x reduction in media waste compared to brands that don't. The highest performers in the study drove positive incremental results for 94% of their media spends.

Improving the economics of advertising and driving better outcomes against key KPIs are persistent challenges for CMOs. By focusing on always-on attribution and real-time inflight optimization, CMOs can extend the performance of their campaigns and drive dramatic increases in Return-On-Ad-Spend (ROAS).

The report highlights a major national Quick Serve Restaurant (QSR) brand that uses LCI (Lift Conversion Index) always-on attribution and real-time inflight optimization to monitor what exactly is driving their restaurant visits and sales. InMarkets' LCI attribution platform demonstrated that this specific chain was able to optimize nearly all impressions served—93% and 7% waste. The study compares this result to another major QSR brand that did not use the LCI's advanced capabilities resulting in a wasted 72% of all impressions served.

Additional highlights from the study on always-on attribution and real-time, in-flight optimization include:

• InMarket found that LCI customers not leveraging always-on, real-time optimization have the opportunity to optimize 75% or more of their media spend: InMarket saw positive results in 94% (6% inefficiency) of the media for their highest-performing brands, while seeing an opportunity for their lower-performing brands not leveraging advanced attribution to optimize 75% of their current media impressions.
• With increasing campaign spending, the opportunity cost of wasted media is rising significantly: For campaigns nearing $20 million, if 75% of the campaign is non-performing, then that lack of optimization within their campaign is equivalent to 15 million wasted dollars in advertising spending.

"Consumer behavior is constantly shifting and evolving, requiring marketers to react and optimize in real-time to assure they engage consumers when and where it matters most," said Todd Morris, CEO of InMarket. "Traditional media approaches focused on lowering the costs associated with advertising. However, today's advanced measurement technologies empower CMOs to drive unsurpassed experiences, outcomes and efficiency from existing investments. We're excited to partner with CMOs to help them better engage consumers while also driving improved media efficiency and effectiveness." 

Some of North America's largest corporate marketing organizations and brands trust InMarket's award winning advanced LCI attribution solution to optimize their media investments. InMarket's LCI has become the industry's leading attribution platform for marketers and agencies to understand the impact of their omnichannel marketing spend from impression to visit to purchase. For more information on InMarket's LCI visit https://inmarket.com/attribution.

"CMOs are facing growing budget pressures and increased expectations to drive positive ROAS from their media investments," said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. "As a result, attribution adoption has become mission critical in order to accurately measure outcomes from media efforts, while further informing marketing and media strategies."

Spending on attribution software globally is expected to experience a strong 15.5% CAGR from 2022 to 2031, reaching $12.9 billion globally according to Allied Market Research. The CMO Council's 16,000-plus members control approximately $1 trillion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. The council works to connect thought leaders and key players across multiple industries to build strong relationships among a strong group of senior corporate marketing executives. For more information, visit www.cmocouncil.org.

Addition of Stackbit introduces a visual experience editor for non-developers to create and edit website and app UIs in real-time from a browser

Netlify, the leading platform for modern web development, today announced the acquisition of visual editing solution Stackbit.

For the past several years, web development platforms have focused on giving enterprises better tools that focus on developer productivity. Now, companies are looking for tools to deliver unparalleled value to marketers and product managers with collaboration orchestration. The acquisition of Stackbit expands Netlify's product portfolio, empowering marketers and product managers with the ability to design, create, and edit experiences within composable platforms.

With enterprise customers like Telus, one of Canada's largest telecommunication companies, Stackbit enables marketers, product managers and project managers to create and update new and existing websites and applications. Stackbit is easy to use and can aggregate content from any headless CMS, content source, or custom data source, creating a streamlined singular workflow for front-end content changes. Stackbit has the power to update objects within the UI and write the changes automatically to the originating source.

Stackbit reduces bottlenecks and increases developer productivity by empowering all employees to make web changes quickly and easily. The addition of Stackbit to the Netlify platform gives Netlify customers the tools they need to quickly update web copy and content, make edits, localize content, and execute faster. Marketers and other business users are now equipped to seamlessly deliver innovative and agile marketing campaigns to all website visitors and app users worldwide faster. 

"This acquisition brings the power of Stackbit's visual editor to our product portfolio, expanding our offerings to now empower marketers and non-developers to rapidly create, innovate, and iterate. " said Matt Biilmann, CEO at Netlify.

The generative AI startup is collaborating with Comcast’s Customer Experience team on a pilot project utilizing its text-to-video technology to create personalized customer education videos

Rephrase.ai, the generative AI startup that aims to humanize communication through synthetic media, officially graduated from the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Generative AI Accelerator program yesterday during a summit held at the Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia. During the six-week immersive program that Rephrase.ai participated in alongside seven other highly promising generative AI startups, it established proof of concept. As a result, it’s now collaborating with Comcast’s Customer Experience team on a pilot project utilizing its text-to-video technology to create personalized customer education videos.

“We were fortunate to be hand selected from hundreds of applicants to participate in Comcast NBCUniversal’s distinguished accelerator, and as we conclude the program, we’re thrilled to be collaborating on this pilot,” said Asheray Malhotra, Rephrase.ai’s co-founder and CEO. “Working side-by-side with leaders at Comcast has allowed us to demonstrate how generative AI solutions enable companies to connect with customers on a one-on-one level by delivering personalized videos at an unmatched scale for sales, marketing, and customer education purposes.”

Rephrase.ai aims to democratize video production by using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that creates a mapping between a person's facial features and audio to replicate a digital avatar of them to be used in future videos with text-to-video scripts. With video becoming the new default mode of communication, this synthetic video creation empowers businesses to scale and humanize their engagement efforts. The company has worked with over 15,000 customers and over 50 global enterprises to date, including Castrol, Xiaomi, and Mondelez, which was recently honored alongside its agency Ogilvy with the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix award at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for its ‘Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad’ campaign, which Rephrase.ai powered.

The Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Generative AI Accelerator is currently led by Laura Plunkett and Luke Butler, Executive Directors of Startup Engagement at Comcast NBCUniversal, in partnership with VentureFuel, an organization that helps corporations around the world innovate through startup collaborations. During the program, founders receive the opportunity to grow alongside teams at Comcast, NBCUniversal, and Sky by sharing insights, as well as scoping out new projects that showcase their technology and how it can provide value to large enterprises.

“Given the caliber of the startups selected for the LIFT Labs Accelerator, it’s no surprise that we have identified growth opportunities for each one of them,” said Sam Schwartz, Chief Business Development Officer, Comcast. “We are excited to continue learning from these innovative startup founders to deepen our understanding of the potential of emerging technologies such as generative AI.”

With Anomalo, Enterprises Can Trust the Contents of All Their Data and Know if Their Data is Arriving On Time and Arriving Completely

Anomalo, the complete data quality platform company, today announced that it has expanded its platform to include metadata-based observability for all tables in an enterprise data warehouse. Enterprises can now do basic monitoring of the entire data warehouse in minutes and at low cost and use that as a pathway into deep data quality monitoring to identify issues with the contents of their data. Anomalo will be showcasing this new capability this week at the Data + AI Summit by Databricks and Snowflake Summit.

"Our customers have always said that they want to monitor every single table in their data warehouse or data lake for data issues. But especially in this environment, applying Anomalo's full deep monitoring capabilities to every single table is neither necessary nor cost-efficient,” said Elliot Shmukler, co-founder and CEO of Anomalo. “With our new table observability checks, basic monitoring can now be applied cost-efficiently to the entire data warehouse with the flexibility to use Anomalo's unsupervised data monitoring, metric checks and validation rules only on the most important tables. Thus enterprises now have the flexibility with Anomalo that cover all of their data observability and data quality needs."

Anomalo launched in 2021 with the industry’s most robust deep data quality monitoring platform. Customers include some of the biggest brands like Block, BuzzFeed, Discover Financial Services, Notion and Substack. 

Anomalo’s platform looks inside enterprise data and automatically detects and root-causes data issues, allowing teams to resolve any hiccups with their data before making decisions, running operations or powering models. Anomalo leverages machine learning to rapidly assess a wide range of data sets with minimal human input. If desired, enterprises can fine-tune Anomalo’s monitoring through the low-code configuration of metrics and validation rules. 

With the addition of metadata-based monitoring of the entire data warehouse, customers can gain the peace of mind of knowing their entire data warehouse is covered broadly without incurring additional data warehouse costs.

"While companies need accurate data, they also need to reduce expensive compute workloads wherever possible. Anomalo's two-tiered approach to data observability helps enterprises go deep where it matters--for example, to check the quality of financial or compliance-sensitive records--but avoid unnecessary processing of lower-tier data,” said Kevin Petrie, vice president of research at Eckerson Group.

“Adding the new functionality of table observability gives our data teams another tool to use to ensure data quality is monitored at Block so our users and customers have trust in our data. Data observability fills a need for the future of our data strategy,” said Tim Ng, engineering lead of data products at Square.

Investment creates global leverage for AI and technology platform innovation

TTEC Holdings, Inc. , one of the largest global customer experience (CX) technology and services innovators for AI-enabled CX solutions, today announced the opening of the TTEC Digital Innovation Studio – Hyderabad to strengthen the company's capabilities integrating and orchestrating exceptional customer experiences around the world.

This expansion further accelerates TTEC Digital's development and integration with the world's leading CX technology platforms – including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, and Genesys – along with the company's world-class analytics & AI, CX consulting, and product development capabilities.

"The TTEC Digital Innovation Studio – Hyderabad enables us to continue delivering exceptional CX across every geography and industry, and support our purpose of delivering humanity to the customer experience," said Dave Seybold, CEO of TTEC Digital. "TTEC Digital has rich knowledge in designing and orchestrating exceptional CX for a digital-first world. We're taking this further, using AI to supercharge these capabilities and transform how our clients serve their customers. Hyderabad is vital to this innovation pipeline."

TTEC Digital's India operations have grown significantly since the company entered the country in 2020. TTEC Digital has doubled its Hyderabad workforce in each of the past two years, with more than 500 employees currently, and will continue to scale aggressively. The Company also maintains expertise for its business process outsourcing business and back-office functions in India.

"We are thrilled to establish the TTEC Digital Innovation Studio – Hyderabad, enabling us to deliver more value to our customers, grow our business, and contribute to the local economy," said Amol Gupta, head of India for TTEC Digital. "Hyderabad is known for its diverse, high-quality talent and modern infrastructure, making it a preferred destination for enterprises across the globe. TTEC will further support the community where we live and work through our commitment to Environmental, Social, and Governance principles."

The Company is growing its Indian workforce with experienced hires along with recent college graduates who are supported by a rigorous, 12-week training program through Digital U. Employees also have access to professional development opportunities with more than 10,000 courses offered through TTEC Talent, empowering them to grow their career with the company.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) is foundational at TTEC and is supported by the TTEC Diversity Council, a global, employee-driven organization that advances DE&I priorities at the company. As a result, the Company is increasing its diversity in India and expects the percentage of female employees to reach 40% by the end of 2023.

Strategic Partnership for Next-Gen Solutions Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft Teams and Moody’s Proprietary Data to Empower Financial Services, Capital Markets and More

Moody’s Corporation and Microsoft today announced a new strategic partnership to deliver next-generation data, analytics, research, collaboration and risk solutions for financial services and global knowledge workers. Built on a combination of Moody’s robust data and analytical capabilities and the power and scale of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, the partnership creates innovative offerings that enhance insights into corporate intelligence and risk assessment, powered by Microsoft AI and anchored by Moody’s proprietary data, analytics and research.

Strategic Partnership Highlights

• Microsoft and Moody’s are co-creating new products and services for research and risk assessment, built on Azure OpenAI Service for enhanced data and risk management.
• “Moody’s CoPilot,” an internal copilot tool, is now deployed to Moody’s 14,000 global employees, and will combine Moody’s proprietary data, analytics and research with the latest large language models (LLMs) and Microsoft’s world-class generative AI technology to drive firm-wide innovation and enhance employee productivity in a safe and secure digital sandbox.
• Moody’s is adopting Microsoft Teams to provide a new platform for its knowledge workers and customers that will enhance collaboration, productivity, and communication, while maintaining the highest compliance standards.
• For internal use and co-innovations, Microsoft is leveraging Moody’s broad range of solutions, including Moody’s Orbis database – one of the world’s most powerful databases on companies – with applications that include third-party reference data, counterparty risk assessment, and supply chain management.
• Microsoft and Moody’s will collaborate on the opportunity to deliver data to their shared customers through Microsoft Fabric, a new analytics platform for end-to-end data management.
• Moody’s commits to using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to power its growing suite of generative AI capabilities and cloud-based applications.

Rob Fauber, president and chief executive officer of Moody's Corporation, said, “Generative AI represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance how companies navigate the ever-evolving world of exponential risk. By combining Microsoft’s cutting-edge AI capabilities with our proprietary data, research and analytics, Moody’s is positioned to lead the next generation of risk analysis, helping our customers make better decisions by unlocking deeper, more integrated, and unmatched perspectives on risk. We have activated our 14,000 global employees to drive unprecedented experimentation and ignite new innovations across our suite of products and solutions. We are excited to partner with Microsoft to set the standard for how generative AI will pioneer new advancements across our industry.”

Unlocking Advancements in Integrated Risk Analysis

A new copilot tool for customers, “Moody’s Research Assistant,” will unlock the full potential of Moody’s resources and solutions to provide customers with a multifaceted view of risk. Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and available through multiple channels, including Microsoft Teams, Moody’s Research Assistant will quickly compile and summarize complex information from multiple data sources, all in a safe and secure environment that protects private and proprietary information. Among its many anticipated uses will be the ability to generate custom, detailed analyses of a company or sector by seamlessly combining data from across multiple dimensions – such as firmographic data, credit indicators, economic forecasts, and risk and reputational profiles – to provide fast, contextual and informative answers based on the integration of expansive LLMs and Moody’s industry-leading data, analytics and research.

Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft said, “Our partnership will bring together world-class insights from Moody’s with the capabilities, trust and breadth of Microsoft Cloud – including Azure OpenAI Service, Fabric and Teams – to enable next-gen solutions that will unlock powerful business intelligence and transform productivity and collaboration. We look forward to the new opportunities and value this will bring to employees and firms across banking, capital markets and insurance as well as those in other industries such as manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation and utilities.”

Enhancing Moody’s Collaboration and Productivity through Microsoft Teams

Additionally, through the partnership, Moody’s will leverage Microsoft Teams to create a new collaboration, productivity and communication platform for its knowledge workers and customers. With the integration of Moody’s copilot tools, Teams will automate and streamline manual workflows, provide more efficient access to data and content, and synthesize and summarize information from across multiple data sets, resulting in better insights, improved productivity and compliance, and enhanced employee and customer experiences.

Collaborating to Enhance the New Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft and Moody’s will collaborate on the opportunity to deliver data to their shared customers through Microsoft Fabric, a new end-to-end data analytics platform. Microsoft Fabric includes technologies like Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory and Power BI in a single unified product, allowing data engineers opportunity to easily connect and curate data from multiple sources, eliminating sprawl, while better governing data across the entire organization.

Cloudinary today announced it has launched Cloudinary Composable Storefront for B2C Commerce on Salesforce AppExchange, empowering customers to more easily create Salesforce Composable Storefronts filled with the rich, AI-optimized, and fast-loading images, videos and 3D experiences that engage and convert. As an API-first image and video platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, Cloudinary is a natural fit for the headless architectures supported by Salesforce Composable Storefront, which unleash the front-end user experience from the back-end technologies and create opportunities to efficiently customize digital storefronts.

Cloudinary Composable Storefront for B2C Commerce is currently available on AppExchange at https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N4V00000KJJT3UAP&tab=e.

Cloudinary Composable Storefront for B2C Commerce

As more brands turn to composable commerce for the flexibility and control it offers, Cloudinary provides a single visual media hub for all images and videos across the tech stack and enables seamless integration with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Composable Storefront, Page Designer, Marketing Cloud and with customer CMS, PIM and marketing automation platforms. Brands taking advantage of this integration can now automatically optimize images and videos for the best quality at the smallest file size, significantly reducing asset weight and page load times. The integration also provides seamless access to Cloudinary’s AI video capabilities out-of-the-box and to low-code product galleries that feature a range of dynamic content, including images, videos, 3D, 360 spin sets, plus shoppable video and augmented reality.

Comments on the News

• "As the appetite for images and videos throughout the buyer journey accelerates, so too does the number of e-commerce brands adopting composable architecture,” said Kobi Schwarts, Global VP of Channels and Alliances, Cloudinary. “We’re pleased to help make it easier than ever for brands to enable the visually immersive commerce experiences their customers love, now and in the future.”
• “Cloudinary Composable Storefront for B2C Commerce is a welcome addition to AppExchange, as it accelerates business transformation for customers by helping them unleash the full potential of their images, videos and other rich media. Cloudinary’s robust APIs and AI capabilities enable developers, marketers and creative teams to automate, optimize and deliver immersive visual experiences at scale,” said David Lee, Vice President of Product Management, AppExchange. “AppExchange is constantly evolving to connect customers with the right apps and experts for their business needs.”