Appnovation will build industry solutions with Google Cloud's Generative AI technologies

Appnovation, a global digital partner today announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to develop new generative AI services. Through the partnership, Appnovation will help brands advance their businesses with generative AI strategies and go to market with AI-powered solutions and experiences that solve business needs. 

Appnovation is already working with clients to implement generative AI strategies and solutions using Google Cloud’s AI technologies. With a focus on integrating disruptive AI technologies into existing business processes and models, these solutions will provide more efficiency, better experiences and ease of use for all users.

“More and more often, clients are coming to us to understand how generative AI could benefit their business. As a digital partner, we’re not only helping businesses understand the possibilities, but also building solutions that make an impact today and lay the foundation for future success” said Yvette Yanne, EVP Innovation & Transformation at Appnovation. “Our partnership with Google Cloud will enable the Appnovation team to provide strategy and build and deploy generative AI-powered solutions for clients, ultimately helping them advance and accelerate.”

“It is exciting to know that Appnovation will be able to help some of the world’s most recognized brands accelerate their generative AI adoption using Google Cloud's technologies,” said Jim Anderson, Vice President, NA Partners Ecosystem & Channels at Google Cloud. “We are proud to expand our work together and look forward to the impact Appnovation will have on industries like health, consumer goods, and more.”

Appnovation’s technology team will implement a variety of Google Cloud technologies to build AI solutions. As an Application Development Specialized partner, we have the Google Cloud-validated skills to help brands bring even the boldest ideas to life. 

Fiverr Certified builds a unique freelance marketplace of vetted experts for these companies, so that they can better reach and serve their customers.

Fiverr International Ltd. (NYSE: FVRR), the company that is revolutionizing how the world works together, today announced the launch of Fiverr Certified. Fiverr Certified builds a unique freelance marketplace for each of its tech partners. Freelancers are then certified specifically by those companies, which include Amazon Ads, monday.com, and Stripe, empowering these well-known brands to better support their customers by connecting them with a trusted expert.

Fiverr Certified is already helping partners, like monday.com, grow their customer base. “Partnering with Fiverr Certified has helped us serve a completely new client segment. We can now deliver professional services and solutions to our customers from vetted, certified professionals,” said Ophir Penso, a monday.com VP of Channel Partnerships & Indirect Sales. “We appreciate the opportunity to serve existing customers who, before Fiverr Certified, didn’t have an end-to-end dedicated marketplace where they can service or customize their experience with our product.”

Fiverr Certified is also solving the pressing need for small businesses that typically do not get sufficient support from the SaaS vendors they use. Many small businesses don’t have full-time IT staff to install, customize and maintain the SaaS products they use; now experts, certified by the tech company partners, will be easily accessible and available to assist. Managers can quickly find vetted experts endorsed by companies, like Podia, for their proficiency in their products. “Fiverr Certified is exactly what we were looking for – a way to identify, certify, and promote Podia experts so that our users can find the right service provider for their specific needs,” said Mandi Ehman, Director of Marketing for Podia. “It’s truly a win-win-win for Podia users, the certified experts, and Podia!”

Fiverr Certified is also helping Fiverr freelancers expand their skill set and revenue. “Fiverr exists to connect every business to exceptional talent, in the simplest way possible,” said Fiverr Founder and CEO, Micha Kaufman. “Fiverr Certified is a natural progression towards that goal – producing beautifully simple product solutions to tedious business problems. Now businesses can be matched instantaneously with experts certified by our partners to get results they can trust.”

Blend360, a leading data science solutions provider, today announced its acquisition of Montevideo Labs in a continued expansion of Blend360's global capabilities.

Blend360's acquisition of Montevideo Labs, a prominent data engineering firm in Latam, consisting of 100 highly skilled professionals, marks a significant advancement in their capabilities. With an impressive track record of over 10 years in hands-on experience, Montevideo Labs has successfully catered to Fortune 500 clients, adeptly handling intricate data engineering, AI, and software development challenges. Montevideo Labs solutions portfolio has resulted in cost savings of millions of dollars and significant revenue increase for their clients. This collaboration empowers Blend360 to deliver robust and comprehensive data solutions to its clients, further strengthening their position in the field. By combining their expertise, Blend360 is exceptionally well-equipped to provide cutting-edge services and drive innovation in data science and engineering.

The acquisition of Montevideo Labs is Blend360's third acquisition in less than a year as it continues to rapidly scale both organically and inorganically. With this latest acquisition, Blend360 is cementing its reputation as the "acquirer of choice". The company's strategic thinking, domain expertise, and client-centric focus are driving its continued growth and success. This latest move reinforces Blend360's commitment to delivering impactful business results for its clients. As a result of the acquisition, Blend360 is now well-positioned to expand its offerings and capabilities, further solidifying its position as a top player in the industry.

This latest acquisition is an exciting development for the company, particularly given its accelerated investments in AI capabilities. The company is doubling down on its data engineering capabilities, which will further enhance its ability to deliver innovative marketing solutions for clients. With this latest addition to its portfolio, Blend360 is well poised to leverage technology and data to drive business results for its clients through additional 'Best of the World' talent and global expertise.

"Upon meeting the Blend360's team we quickly discovered that we share the same core values and work ethos. In addition, our service offerings beautifully complement each other, creating a powerful synergy where the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. With our combined expertise, we are poised to take a tremendous leap forward, benefiting not only our organizations but also our valued clients." says Máximo Gurméndez, CEO at Montevideo Labs. 

"In the first meeting with Montevideo Labs, I was impressed by the strength of their capabilities and how their values shone through. That impression has grown over time to the point where not introducing our clients to them seems like a disservice. This nearshore expansion and entering Latin America doesn't just make sense, I'm truly excited and passionate about how it solves real client challenges and brings amazing talent into play" says Rob Fuller, SVP Technology Leader of Data Science and Engineering

Contentstack, the leading Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provider, today announced it was named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape of Worldwide Headless Content Management Systems (Doc #US50826923, June 2023). The IDC MarketScape assessment noted the following strengths for Contentstack - AI-based content service, operation support and customer satisfaction.

The assessment evaluated 6 headless CMS vendors using a rigorous scoring methodology that examined product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and each vendor's current and future market success factors.

According to the IDC MarketScape assessment, "Contentstack received positive feedback from surveyed customers in the areas of product value, ease of administration, ease of content authoring, and application availability. Customers cited high availability for high transaction sites with impressive customer support. Contentstack provides a dedicated Customer Success team to proactively reach out to customers with its Care Without Compromise program."

"We take our responsibility to provide the best products and services to customers extremely seriously. It's in our DNA," said Neha Sampat, founder and CEO of Contentstack. "So we're happy to see that the IDC MarketScape has recognized Contentstack's efforts across the board, especially when it comes to customer support and innovation."

Contentstack's headless CMS empowers marketers and developers to deliver digital experiences quickly and with uncompromising scale and dependability. The IDC MarketScape noted, "Contentstack offers plug-ins for ChatGPT, IBM Watson, SFDC Einstein, MonkeyLearn, and AWS Rekognition and a marketplace with additional plug-ins to enrich content or programmatically suggest changes. Contentstack has a data science team that have built AI/ML capabilities related to text intelligence and media intelligence."

Companies such as ASICS, Chase, Express, Holiday Inn, Icelandair, Mattel, Mitsubishi, Riot Games and Shell trust Contentstack to power their most critical content experiences. The Company has raised $169 million in total funding.

In Partnership with Publishers, New Program Aggregates Audiences Around Popular Interests

For the first time, brands looking for alternatives to programmatic targeting can reach millions of people around specific interests using the new Interest Collectives from Flipboard, the world's first social magazine. Starting with key verticals travel and technology, ad campaigns that run on Flipboard can now expand to contextually relevant partner sites. To create the first Interest Collectives, Flipboard is teaming up with publisher partners such as Atlas Obscura, Frommer's and VentureBeat, to bundle inventory around top interests, increasing a brand's reach as much as tenfold.

The Travel and Tech Collectives launch today, and Finance Collective will roll out over the summer. The Interest Collectives bring together select content from Flipboard curators, creators, email newsletters and high-quality relevant publisher partner sites with the purpose of creating highly engaged audiences at scale around a single interest. For instance, the Travel Interest Collective combines the audience of Flipboard's popular travel destination with visitors to renowned travel sites such as Atlas Obscura, Explore, Fodor's and Frommer's, helping brands connect with people who are looking for destinations, attractions, travel-planning advice and places to stay. 

"Over the past few years, we have partnered closely with Flipboard on a number of initiatives and we have seen substantial referral traffic and engagement from an audience that goes deep on travel," said Pauline Frommer, editorial director at Frommer's,. "We view this program as a win-win because it allows us to continue growing engagement on Flipboard, while supplementing our direct sales efforts with new monetization opportunities."

Similarly, the Tech Interest Collective attracts an audience that's interested in all things tech, including gadgets, AI and startups, on Flipboard and partner sites such as 9to5Mac, Digital Trends and VentureBeat. The Finance Collective consists of publications like Moneywise that provide financial news, money-saving advice and smart investing tips, allowing brands to align with savvy readers interested in market trends and wealth management.

"As privacy concerns continue to grow and data collection becomes more restricted, contextual advertising will be one of the most effective ways to reach qualified audiences in quality environments," said Mike McCue, CEO and cofounder of Flipboard. "We are creating the Interest Collectives to help brands reach individuals united by common interests, with high intent, and actively seeking to learn, share experiences, and form opinions about brands, products, and services, both on and off our platform."

The Interest Collectives build on the ability for advertisers to connect with audiences in contextually relevant ways via Flipboard's Interest Graph informed by the platform's 30,000 topics and indexed via machine learning algorithms based on content from more than 4,000 publishers. This creates an opportunity for brands to scale strategic contextual targeting: advertisers can reach relevant audiences across platforms, formats and devices. 

An Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) study found that integrating contextual and audience targeting led to a 68 percent increase in ad effectiveness. Along with the benefits to advertisers, publishers participating in the Interest Collectives are able to show high quality ads to readers, increase their advertiser mix and diversify their revenue. When an ad is served from the open marketplace, publishers have limited control over the context or quality; Interest Collectives restore their ability to ensure high quality and relevant ads.

User experience a driving factor in new functionality and solutions developed across Hyland's product portfolio

Hyland, recognized by Gartner as a content services industry leader for 12 consecutive years, has launched its latest product enhancements and innovative solutions that will help its customers in their digital evolution journeys.

The new product functionality, which encompasses an array of Hyland's content services offerings, empower organizations to advance employee and customer experience initiatives while benefiting from improved platform scalability, administration and user interface enhancements.

"Hyland continues to identify ways to enhance our product suite and develop new solutions to drive our customers' digital transformations forward," said John Phelan, executive vice president and chief product officer at Hyland. "These latest enhancements are no different, with a broad set of applications across both our platform-level offerings and industry-specific applications. These features meet our goal of providing our customers around the globe with the most flexible and configurable cloud content services solutions."

SAP SuccessFactors integration: Hyland's new OnBase integration for SAP SuccessFactors leverages a leading content services platform to connect HR content to corresponding employee data. Customers can use the integration to solve several business challenges, including general employee HR administration, HR onboarding, document compliance and more.

The OnBase integration for SAP SuccessFactors removes document silos and improves HR processes by providing content management capabilities directly from within the SAP SuccessFactors user interface. With simple clicks within a modern interface, SAP SuccessFactors users can capture and view employee documents, execute document tasks through workflows, and store content in OnBase – all without ever leaving the SAP SuccessFactors application. 

Alfresco: New enhancements across Hyland's Alfresco platform are focused across the user experience — including Alfresco Digital Workspace, Mobile Workspace and Desktop Sync — and provide a range of options for delivering engaging user experiences that present relevant content in the appropriate context.

Other updates include:

• New options for content-centric workflows and event-based form validation that enable organizations to automate tedious manual tasks, standardize decision-making and improve results
• Improvements on industry-leading governance tools that simplify administration and provide enhanced security controls to ensure that sensitive or proprietary content is protected from unauthorized or inappropriate access

Nuxeo: New features in Hyland's Nuxeo Platform are also focused on user experience and security, as the Compound Documents enhancement allows end users to deal with compound documents out of the box without having to write scripts. Meanwhile, Content Redaction provides additional security for sensitive information while still being able to share most of a document – making it perfect for case management or document management.

Meanwhile, Append with Bulk Edit provides more editing options for multivalued properties, making it easier and faster to edit without duplicating efforts. 

Additional features now available for Hyland customers include an update to PACSgear Enterprise, Hyland Healthcare's enterprise imaging solution, which now supports chromium-based browsers and has increased flexibility for customers' web-based applications. Within the solution, Image Link DICOM Modality Worklist streamlines encounter-based workflow by associating critical metadata for better image management and clinical visibility.

Customers now can deploy Hyland's Content Composer solution for customer communications management (CCM) in the Hyland Cloud. This release also enables customers to derive even further value from using the product with Splunk and OnBase while remaining confident that Content Composer continues to support new versions of popular Microsoft products.

Younger and more affluent customers are the most interested, especially when it comes to personalized, interactive and AI video

A survey of 2,009 adults in the U.S. and U.K. found that more than 8 out of 10 consumers want brands who communicate with them to use video more, but 7 out of 10 rarely or never get it.

The State of Video Technology report released today also shows rising interest in advanced video communications compared to last year’s survey. This trend is most noticeable among younger and more affluent consumers, early adopters who are the most eager for this type of content from brands.

Key findings:

• There’s a video gap in brand communications: 81% of people want more video from brands, but 70% rarely or never get it. While this video demand gap is lessening (74% of consumers last year said they rarely or never get video), it’s still a huge missed opportunity.
• Personalized video massively outperforms generic video, driving increased adoption: It’s nearly 4x more likely to increase loyalty and brand trust, the same uplift reported in 2022. This effectiveness is likely leading to higher adoption, with 25% of consumers having received a personalized video this year compared with only 17% last year.
• Interactive video is now mainstream: Interest in video with interactivity is higher than last year. Almost 8 out of 10 consumers now say they want interactive video content from brands.
• Younger consumers and high earners respond to video innovation: These two demographics, identified in last year's study as early adopters, want advanced video the most. 89% want brands to use video more, and 88% want interactive video from brands.

“Last year, we found an alarming gap between consumer demand for video and what brands deliver, and that trend continues this year,” said Yotam Benami, Idomoo CMO. “But people don’t just want video. They’re actively seeking innovative video formats including personalized and interactive video and even AI video. Interestingly, this preference is again strongest among high-value early adopter segments such as Gen Z and high earners.”

The study also showed that the U.K. market lags behind the U.S. in both adoption and interest in advanced video comms. For example, 29% of Americans have received a personalized video while only 22% of their U.K. counterparts have, and 83% of U.S. respondents were interested in interactive video, compared to only 76% of their U.K. peers.