Nstream mentioned in “Unified Real-Time Platforms” developing its own native stream processing capabilities

Nstream, a leading and innovative provider of solutions for the fastest way to build full-stack, open-source streaming apps that provide real-time insights, today announced that Nstream has been recognized by Gartner as an example vendor of Unified Real-Time Platforms in the Market Guide for Event Stream Processing for its streaming application platform as a service (PaaS).1

According to Gartner, “Event stream processing (ESP) platforms are a prominent example of software that is used to process streaming data in real time. Organizations also use custom code; commercial SaaS or packaged applications; stream-enabled DBMSs; stream data integration (SDI) tools; unified real-time platforms; or analytics and BI (ABI) platforms for other kinds of real-time streaming.”
The approximate use of ESP Platforms is:

• Two-thirds support real-time operational applications.
• One-third for ingesting, transforming and storing streaming data for subsequent analytics applications.

“Gartner evaluated event stream processing platforms and their support of real-time analytics and stream data integration on data in motion. This Market Guide is designed to help data and analytics leaders decide when to use ESP platforms instead of alternative tools for real-time processing of their proliferating streaming data.” ¹

Officially recognized by Gartner as a named example for “Unified Real-Time Platforms,” we feel Nstream is developing its own native stream processing capabilities.

Nstream’s application development platform enables enterprises to build powerful streaming data applications in minutes not months by providing a fully integrated stack. The technology innovations that enable this stack are stateful services, streaming APIs, and real-time UIs.

It is now possible to build streaming data applications that achieve network-level latency at 70 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) all without the need for streaming processing frameworks, additional databases or application servers, or data visualization applications software.

Examples of streaming data applications include real-time marketplaces (ride sharing, on-demand delivery services), real-time customer 360 (personalized offers & recommendations, proactive support), and real-time visibility (predictive maintenance, inventory management, asset tracking).

Netstream has worked with numerous customers that have experienced 10x faster time to value – one customer deployed in production at scale (200M+ events/second) in just six weeks. Other customers have reduced complexity with a 70 percent lower TTCO, including 4x lesser engineering horns to design, build, test, and maintain.

According to Mark Braby, General Manager of EV Charging at Itron, "Our guiding principles were to take advantage of Itron’s strengths in energy measurement and ingesting real-time data at the grid edge, develop purpose-built software applications, and then determine how we could use this to develop a software solution to accelerate EV charging deployments. We knew the platform had to scale to millions of endpoints, and to manage energy for commercial customers and grid operators it needed to be utility-grade, secure, and resilient, so we spent the time to get the technology right.”

“A Market Guide defines a market and explains what clients can expect it to do in the short term. With the focus on early, more chaotic markets, a Market Guide does not rate or position vendors within the market, but rather more commonly outlines attributes of representative vendors that are providing offerings in the market to give further insight into the market itself.” 

B2B marketers can now target the same people across email and digital marketing channels for improved reach and conversion through a single platform

Versium, a leading data technology company, today announced a significant expansion to its REACH platform with the addition of Business Person Email Lists, helping B2B marketers to target the same people across email and digital marketing channels. Versium customers can now access all the identity data, tools and integrations they need to execute successful B2B omnichannel campaigns, through a single subscription in one unified platform.

According to research from McKinsey, 94% of B2B sales and marketing teams say an omnichannel model is as effective or more effective in engaging with customers compared to the model they used before the pandemic. B2B customers now use a staggering 10 or more channels to interact with potential vendors. Marketers must meet customers and prospects across multiple channels, multiple times along the buyers' journey to make an impact.

Business Person Email Lists help B2B marketers to generate targeted email and digital marketing omnichannel campaigns for the same targets – reaching them everywhere they are online. Versium’s new solution taps into a subset of data from its industry-leading identity graph technology, including over 70 million business professionals from 1,000 industries and nearly 2 million domains. Versium’s Business Person Email Lists solution is further bolstered by additional consumer contact points that enable the industry’s greatest digital reach, enabling marketers to maximize brand awareness and improve conversion rates. Versium customers have even significantly reduced cost of conversion by nearly 50% when enhancing their B2B identity data.

"With this new functionality added, we are once again making it easier for marketers to get closer than ever to their ideal customer," said Chris Matty, co-founder and chief revenue officer at Versium. "Business Person Email Lists are the next expansion of our vision to create the most comprehensive data tools in one subscription platform. Versium is committed to making data easier for marketers to understand and use, and Versium REACH is the simplest, all-in-one tool for omnichannel marketing."

With their latest Release, Kudzu is delivering an OpenAI-powered form builder and a new token-based price model. Kudzu users can now generate entirely new forms, improve/reimagine existing forms, and author them to a growing list of low and no code platforms.

Kudzu Software Inc., an Atlanta-based forms migration, reimagination, and ideation platform provider is pleased to announce the general availability of its Generative AI Assistant, Kudzu Bot, along with a new token-based pricing model.

Kudzu Bot, which leverages OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 LLMs, can be used to generate entirely new form models in as few as a couple words (e.g., PTO Request) or reimagine an existing form by suggesting new fields, options for choice lists, and more.

“There’s been a lot of activity and hype in the Generative AI space in the past few months and my reaction is generally some form of that’s really cool, but what are you going to do with it?” said Rob D’Oria, Kudzu’s Co-Founder and CEO. D’Oria adds, “We started looking at Generative AI back in November ’22 because we saw an opportunity to transform the output of these LLMs into something that could be used by our platform to ideate new forms or reimagine existing ones. We just needed to figure out how to talk to them and took our time to get it right. And the results clearly demonstrate that we got it right.”

The new token-based pricing model, Anyform Tokens, provides for a lower cost entry point to leverage Kudzu’s tooling, starting at $995 for 100 tokens. Anyform Tokens are consumed based on the complexity of the form model along with the type (Basic, Standard, and Premium) of connector being used to author the form to a destination low or no code platform. A basic form written to a platform like Formstack would cost 1-2 tokens or $10-20. A highly complex form (100’s of fields, repeating sections, dozens of rules, etc.) written to Nintex Automation On-prem (K2 Five) would cost 18-24 tokens or $180-240. For a limited time, new account registrations will receive 10 Anyform Tokens for FREE.

“We’re enabling this type of model to make the platform more accessible to smaller teams within an organization, service providers of all sizes, and solopreneurs that want to leverage automation and Generative AI to scale themselves.” said Rob D’Oria. D’Oria adds, “We also see opportunities to leverage this model to bundle Kudzu Bot within the subscriptions of our technology partners to create a sort of virtual (on-demand) template library.”

Additionally, this latest release of Kudzu delivers several new readers and writers, self-service account creation, and more.

Brandwatch, the leading enterprise social suite, today unveils its inaugural Change Makers Report which celebrates the 10 boldest organizations, brands, and individuals who have transcended their respective industries to evolve culture globally.

Explore the inaugural list of Brandwatch's Change Makers here.

The report is a result of carefully segmented and analyzed data mixed with expert research, and harnesses the power of recently-announced advancements now embedded in Brandwatch's AI Engine, Iris, to help identify and vet the most influential players of 2023. These latest revelations in GPT tech enable Brandwatch and its clients to tap into and act upon new movements and forces of change across media, culture, and consumer behavior.

For this report Brandwatch defined Change Makers as those using their influence and following to trailblaze new frontiers – through curiosity, creativity, innovation, and action. That presence and those fanbases, in 2023, largely manifest themselves across a digital landscape of social networks, forums, blogs, and media coverage. Their influence reshapes the immediate conversation, and ultimately transforms consumer habits and public opinion on an unprecedented scale.

"The 10 Change Makers we've identified are influencing the cultural zeitgeist through their boldness, as well as the connection and trust they've built with their audiences," said Carrie Parker, Chief Marketing Officer at Brandwatch. "Not only is Brandwatch celebrating that boldness and impact through the Change Makers Report, we're empowering others to become agents of change in their own right – by helping them identify the moments meaningful to their brand at the right time to be able to take action."

Stratus Security announced the findings of a ground-breaking study examining the security measures of over 1 million internet domains. The research, which analyzed the implementation of critical email security measures, identified a concerning trend: a significant percentage of domains are vulnerable to phishing attacks due to misconfigured security records.

Stratus Security's research focused on the configuration of Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) records - crucial defenses in protecting a domain and its users from phishing attacks. Correct configuration of these measures prevents unauthorized parties from sending emails using a domain's identity.

However, the study uncovered widespread misconfigurations leaving domains open to exploitation. Alarmingly, this included highly sensitive government and education domains, commercial entities, and even some surprising outliers like North Korea's sole domain in the study, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mfa.gov.kp).

Stratus Security's researchers found that misconfigurations could potentially allow malicious actors to send emails appearing to come directly from these domains. The most alarming cases were domains tagged with '+all' in their SPF records, essentially inviting anyone to send emails as that domain, with no indications of phishing. One such domain was the Greek public employment service (dypa.gov.gr) - making it possible for virtually anyone to send an email posing as an official communication from this institution.

Stratus Security CTO, Colin Watson, explains: "Phishing attacks rely on trust. When an email appears to come from a reputable source, users and businesses are much more likely to engage with its content. That's why these misconfigurations present such a risk. It's essentially rolling out a red carpet for threat actors to exploit."

The full findings, including additional case studies, are detailed in a comprehensive blog post available on the Stratus Security website: https://www.stratussecurity.com/post/email-security-top-1-million-domains

Stratus Security urges organizations to review and correct their SPF and DMARC records, perform regular audits, foster cybersecurity awareness among their teams, and seek expert assistance if needed. They stand committed to supporting businesses in this endeavor, with the belief in building a safer digital landscape—one domain at a time.

Empowers businesses to experiment faster and streamline software releases while ensuring data security.

Statsig, a leading provider of experimentation and product management solutions, today announced the launch of Statsig Warehouse Native: a powerful, modular experimentation engine that runs natively within an organization’s data warehouse. This offering allows product and data teams to analyze experiments in minutes versus days, and streamline the entire workflow of software releases, A/B testing, and product analytics. With this release, Statsig is the first experimentation platform to provide both warehouse-native and cloud-hosted implementation options.

The highest-performing product teams run multiple experiments every day. Despite knowing this, most organizations use outdated A/B testing methods that are inefficient, error-prone, and turn data teams into bottlenecks for analysis. Statsig helps businesses innovate faster with an integrated suite of tools. Teams can run hundreds of experiments in parallel and get near real-time visibility into how features are impacting business metrics. With this knowledge, organizations can rapidly unlock data-driven decision-making at scale and be confident they are shipping the most impactful features to users. Additionally, product teams can stop overpaying for multiple point solutions and inefficient data connections by moving to a fully integrated platform.

With Statsig Warehouse Native, teams can choose to use Statsig solely for experiment analysis in their warehouse, leverage SDKs for end-to-end targeting and feature rollouts, or even integrate offline experiments as part of a hybrid solution. Capabilities of the platform include:

• Experiment analysis that runs inside the data warehouse from existing source-of-truth datasets.
• A robust stats engine equipped with CUPED, sequential analysis, as well as holdouts and layers (universes) for more sophisticated experimentation.
• Complete visibility into analysis with no-code tools to segment and drill down into results.
• Integrated SDKs supporting feature flags, experimentation, remote configuration, and other tools for managing software releases.
• Product insights, and dashboards for comprehensive data-driven decision-making.
• Enterprise-grade change management features including role-based access control, approval workflows, and auditing capabilities.

"Through feedback from product and data science leaders, we gained deep insights into how we could further enhance our platform and tools," said Vijaye Raji, Statsig Founder and CEO. "We discovered that data science teams value quick iteration, governance, and the ability to avoid duplicating core business metrics in multiple systems."

Early adopters have been using the new tools with positive results. "Statsig saves our team over 12 hours of analyst time per experiment by seamlessly integrating with our existing Snowflake data,” said Mark Phuong, Sr. Data Scientist, Black Crow AI. “We’re operating like a large experimentation organization at an enterprise tech company, effectively organizing, tracking, and analyzing multiple experiments in parallel. The platform has accelerated our data literacy and maturity, providing intuitive visualizations that enable even non-technical users to make informed business decisions.”

New value-based pricing enables greater composability and an improved platform experience. 

mParticle, an AI-powered Customer Data Platform (CDP), today unveiled its new value-based pricing. This revolutionary model empowers brands with unparalleled control and flexibility to compose a customized data stack that fits their unique needs, while optimizing costs and maximizing system performance.

In today's economic environment, data and marketing teams across all industries are optimizing for efficient growth and scrutinizing costs. Recognizing this shift, mParticle's new value-based pricing model allows teams to improve cost efficiency while maintaining value and performance, evolving from a legacy model based on usage caps and overages, to one that better supports flexibility and configurability.

Legacy pricing models for customer data platforms often suffer from cost-to-value misalignment. Traditional user profile-based pricing models charge the same price per user, irrespective of the user's level of engagement and ultimately, the value to the brand. Similarly, traditional Event-based pricing models assign a uniform price to each Event, regardless of its intended use, and the subsequent value realized.

mParticle's value-based pricing offers an innovative solution to solve these challenges by moving beyond a one size fits all approach. Teams can designate Event tiers within the mParticle UI, aligning each data point with an intended use case. For example:

• For data streaming use cases, Events can be designated as ephemeral in nature within the platform without incurring storage and compute costs. This creates a zero data copy solution and eliminates excess costs.
• For customer 360° and data replay use cases, teams can designate Events to be stored but maintained separately from high-compute activities and
• For audience targeting and personalization use cases, Events designated as such will help brands optimize costs by reducing inefficiencies in which data is stored and accessed for real-time calculations such as audience segmentation, customer journey orchestration, and profile enrichment.

"With mParticle's new pricing model, we have improved the efficiency of our platform costs without sacrificing usage and value," describes Ramya Chekuri, Senior Director of Data at Equinox. "The ability to tier our events and optimize our costs as our data volumes continue to grow is critical for delivering impactful customer experiences at scale."

The new pricing model not only creates greater efficiency and value-to-price alignment, but also unlocks a set of best in class product offerings. Rather than a legacy model constrained by caps, overages, and penalties — teams can purchase credits that can be applied toward the usage of any component within the mParticle platform. Moreover, the offering provides a boost to system performance and allows for greater lookback windows on real-time audience calculations.

"Value-based Pricing helps our customers eliminate waste and get the most value out of their CDP investment," said Chee Chew, Chief Product Officer at mParticle. "In this macroeconomic climate where all companies are being more cautious about their spending, we want to provide customers with the best value-to-price ratio possible."

Teads leverages the largest dataset of attention and context, to offer clients unparalleled audience insights and support campaign optimization.

Teads, the global media platform, has announced the release of attention metrics in Teads Ad Manager (TAM), its dynamic programmatic buying platform. This integration makes Teads the first platform to embed Lumen's attention measurement natively and gives clients the ability to measure attention similarly to how they measure viewability. This integration marks one year since the launch of Teads Attention Program, an incubator for innovation, which fueled hundreds of tests with Lumen and other partners in the program. The addition of attention metrics to Teads Ad Manager gives advertisers a one-touch system for measuring and optimizing attention, simplifying an otherwise complex process.

Mike Follett, Managing Director, Lumen Research said: "With the release of attention metrics, Teads has consolidated its position as the easiest, and most widely used system of its kind globally. Now self-serve clients using Teads Ad Manager can measure attention in their campaigns with one click, gaining unprecedented insights into performance by leveraging Lumen's cutting-edge attention models."

By clicking on the 'attention' button within TAM, campaigns are automatically tagged with the Lumen tag, giving advertisers valuable insights on the amount of attention received by their ads, and empowering them to identify the drivers of attention, optimize their campaigns and drive impactful results. These metrics also offer simplicity and sustainability, as they are inherently cookieless and provide a scalable solution for measuring ad effectiveness. Since the launch of our offering, there has been a significant adoption among TAM clients, with Lumen attention measurement being utilized by 20% of their activities on TAM.

Damien Prybis, Head of Digital Trading, OMD France said: "Attention metrics are a key turning point in a more performance driven media planning, and the next step forward for brands seeking an even more clear view on where they should focus their media investment. The introduction of Teads attention metrics brings unparalleled ease in gaining deeper insights into our audiences, enabling us to drive more audience engagement and leverage those invaluable learnings to craft compelling content that captivates and connects."

With 1,236 active agencies and 3,349 active advertisers in 74 markets, Teads has established itself as the leading global end-to-end platform with the largest database of attention insights in the world. Currently, billions of impressions are reported and tagged, all supported by the unmatched scale and user-friendly features offered by Teads Ad Manager. This has translated directly into business results, such as a recent campaign in which a brand achieved remarkable success by strategically leveraging high-attention media across all channels, resulting in a remarkable 42% stronger lift compared to Teads' in-store visitation benchmarks, highlighting the impact of Teads' vast collection of attention insights. Teads is continuing to raise the bar on executional excellence for clients and partners, by continuing to explore new ways to make campaigns more actionable driving business results.

Caroline Hugonenc, Senior Vice President, Research & Insights, Teads said: "By utilizing the largest database of cases combining attention and outcomes on live campaigns, Teads has built an experience that allows clients to easily link attention to outcomes. The integration with Lumen is unparalleled - the deepest and easiest to use - and has produced the largest dataset of its kind in the world. We are proud of the monumental milestones we have achieved, with 103 advertisers onboarded and over 200 campaigns run since the launch of TAM, but this is only the beginning."