In a landmark move poised to change the landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) development, Dekube has announced the launch of its decentralized computing power network. This innovative platform makes it possible for small and medium-sized enterprises or individual developers to create large-scale models, addressing the critical challenge of the high cost and environmental impact of current AI training processes.

AI technology, while advancing rapidly, has been largely dominated by tech giants due to the prohibitive costs of training and developing AI models. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has highlighted that training models like Chat GPT4 could cost around $100 million, a sum far beyond the reach of most companies. This financial barrier has left the AI landscape at risk of being monopolized, hindering innovation and diversity.

Dekube's decentralized network, built on Kubernetes architecture and enhanced peer-to-peer layer, leverages idle GPU resources from household PCs across the globe. This approach significantly reduces the marginal cost of acquiring computing power, making it virtually nonexistent. With the capability to expand into millions of nodes with GPUs, Dekube provides an elastically, efficient, cost-effective alternative to traditional centralized cloud platforms, boasting up to 30% more efficiency on LLM training & fine-tuning, through decentralization by using consumer-grade GPUs.

Eco-Friendly AI Development

In addition to democratizing AI, Dekube addresses the environmental concerns associated with the extensive use of computing resources in AI development. By utilizing idle GPU computing power, Dekube presents a more sustainable model that reduces the carbon footprint associated with AI training and development.

The Dekube Opportunity 

With over 100 million idle GPU computing power units worldwide, the potential for Dekube's network is immense. Even utilizing just 1% of this capacity could mobilize the power of over one million GPU units. This not only opens up unprecedented opportunities for innovation and development for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), subject matter experts and individual developers but also positions home-owned PCs as one of the world's largest computing power networks.

AI Libre Spirit Event

In celebration of its pioneering platform, Dekube has launched the AI Libre Sprint event, offering applicants free compute credits equivalent to 100 x A100 80G graphics cards total, with exceptional teams receiving further support. This initiative underscores Dekube's commitment to fostering innovation and breaking down barriers in AI development.

Closing Words

Dekube's platform marks a significant step towards an inclusive, efficient, and sustainable future for AI development. By lowering the barriers to entry and providing a scalable, low-cost solution, Dekube is poised to subvert the dominance of big tech companies and usher in a new era of innovation.

Introducing New Integrations for RingCX, Miro Enterprise Guard, Zoom Whiteboard, and Embedding in Zoom Compliance Manager

Theta Lake, Inc., a recognized leader in Digital Communications Governance (DCG) & Compliance, has added a number of significant market innovations with new integrations, new capabilities, and ways to acquire/consume Theta Lake capabilities. These new capabilities demonstrate Theta Lake's commitment to solving customer needs and reinforce its position as the only truly unified compliance platform for unified communications and collaboration tools. 

The release showcases advancements in Voice, SMS, Whiteboards, Visual Collaboration, and Theta Lake’s extensive coverage across the spectrum of today’s top communication and collaboration platforms. This covers modalities across voice, electronic communications, and visual content, offering organizations comprehensive compliance solutions for their digital communications governance. Theta Lake offers a flexible suite of capabilities that address compliance capture, recordkeeping, unified search, and storage across various communication tools and modalities. It also provides risk detection with proactive response for surveillance, insider risk, and supervision needs. The release not only strengthens integrated coverage and options for acquiring Theta Lake technology directly through major partners like RingCentral but also establishes a transformative OEM relationship with Zoom, ensuring seamless access to Theta Lake for their customers. Some key innovations for customers include:

• Audio communications coverage with patented compliance transcription in multiple languages, including dynamic translation extended to RingCentral RingCX.
• The industry’s only compliance coverage for all whiteboard eComms and Visual Communications (vComms), including activity logs, text, comments, attachments, drawings, icons, and more.
• Unified and certified compliance coverage for the most products and communication modalities in the Zoom platform suite, with the ability to enable, configure, and manage Theta Lake compliance functionality within the Zoom UI.
• Coverage for all department UCC use cases, including call centers, trading, regulated users, and general end-user communication capture, archiving, search, and risk detection.
• Support for AWS or Azure deployment, including Bring Your Own Encryption Key and Bring Your Own Storage options.

Integral Ad Science, a leading global media measurement and optimization platform, today announced it has earned accreditation by the Media Rating Council (MRC) for its integrated third-party calculation and reporting of YouTube video viewability for desktop and mobile (web and app) using Google's Ads Data Hub for Measurement Partners (ADH-MP). 

"Our latest accreditation from the MRC for third-party calculation and reporting of YouTube viewability further solidifies IAS's position as the global benchmark for trust and transparency in digital media quality," said Kevin Alvero, Chief Compliance Officer at IAS. "Advertisers can continue to transact with IAS for high-quality reporting of digital advertising campaigns."

The full scope of the accreditation covers IAS's third party calculation and reporting of Google ADH-MP measurement data from the Google Ads, Display & Video 360, and YouTube Reserve services. Calculation and reporting is with respect to Google YouTube Video Impressions, Viewable Video Impressions and related Viewability metrics across Desktop, Mobile Web, and Mobile In-App environments. Advertising formats are inclusive of Google's YouTube skippable in-stream ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, standard in-stream, YouTube in-stream select, and bumper ads.

"We congratulate IAS for achieving accreditation for their third-party calculation and reporting of YouTube video impression delivery and viewability based on audited ADH data," said George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director, MRC. "IAS' expansion of their accreditation in this area continues to show their commitment to transparency and to the MRC process." 

IAS is a leader in the media quality space and continues to meet the rigorous requirements necessary to achieve MRC's accreditation. This latest achievement further demonstrates IAS's commitment to bringing even greater transparency and quality to all aspects of the digital measurement landscape.

New OptiGenie advancements include expanded Generative AI Insights, Self-Optimizing Streams, and OptiLive (enabling AI-based real-time, personalized messaging); other new advancements include WhatsApp Integration and Self-Service Data Ingestion, empowering marketers to elevate customer engagement and drive business growth

Optimove, the first Customer-Led Marketing Platform, announced new next-generation advancements to its AI-powered suite, OptiGenie, plus additional features that empower marketers during its annual user conference, Optimove Connect. These advancements equip Optimove clients with cutting-edge tools and technologies to deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive business growth. Each marks a significant milestone on the Optimove product roadmap, further entrenching its position as a leader in retention marketing through enhanced personalization, data insights, and multichannel engagement. Optimove is recognized as an industry leader, ranked #1 by Gartner for Multichannel Marketing Journey Orchestration among Multichannel Marketing Hubs.  

The new OptiGenie advancements include expanded Generative AI Insights, Self-Optimizing Streams, and OptiLive (enabling real-time, personalized messaging). Other new features include WhatsApp Integration and Self-Service Data Ingestion. These enhancements empower marketers to elevate customer engagement and drive business growth. 

OptiGenie Advancements  

1. Generative AI Insights: Optimove is expanding its Generative AI Insights into new use cases, including purchase behavior analysis. Using a chat-based interface, marketers can engage in conversation with OptiGenie to explore campaign performance. This powerful tool provides marketers with actionable insights and recommendations, enabling them to enhance customer engagement and easily drive business outcomes.
   
   
2. Self-Optimizing Streams: Rather than running a "winner take all" A/B/n test for multi-campaign streams, Optimove's revolutionary Self-Optimizing Streams utilize AI to determine the best journey for each customer across a series of touchpoints. Over time, OptiGenie learns, adapts, and continuously optimizes the perfect allocation of customers for each treatment, catering to seasonality, relevant products, and changes in customer preferences. Self-Optimizing Streams build on Optimove's existing Self-Optimizing Campaigns and Journeys, enabling marketers to deliver unprecedented, personalized experiences while aligning with business goals. 
   
   
3. OptiLive: OptiLive elevates fan engagement to the next level with recommendations powered by OptiGenie. This innovation enables brands to drive continuous fan excitement by using in-play events for real-time one-to-one messaging. OptiLive enhances the fan experience by autonomously identifying relevant customers for each real-time event and triggering personalized communications to them. This approach connects customers with timely and relevant messages by leveraging sports insights to share tips, odds, and boosts, driving higher conversion rates and greater fan engagement.  

Other new advancements:

1. WhatsApp Integration: With Optimove's WhatsApp Integration, brands can now seamlessly connect with nearly two billion active users worldwide. This integration enables personalized recommendations and content delivery, enriching customer engagement across channels and allowing brands to integrate WhatsApp interactions into any cross-channel journey seamlessly. WhatsApp can be used for AI-orchestrated campaigns and journeys across Optimove.
   
   
2. Self-Service Data Ingestion: Optimove's Self-Service Data Ingestion empowers marketers to unlock new use cases by seamlessly ingesting data from various sources without engineering resources. This capability accelerates time-to-market for personalized marketing campaigns, enhancing campaign effectiveness and driving better business outcomes.  

According to Shai Frank, SVP of Product at Optimove, "At Optimove, we're committed to making AI accessible to marketers via powerful tools that allow them to truly connect with their customers in real-time. Our mission is to ensure brands deeply engage with customers effectively to drive meaningful interactions. These new advancements underscore our commitment to ensuring marketers create personalized customer experiences that maximize customer retention and lifetime value."

Capturing user actions in combination with user feedback data empowers businesses to understand how their customers use their products and where there are points of friction across the user journey 

unitQ, the leader in Quality Automation, announced a major milestone today — enhancements to unitQ that empower organizations to view and analyze real-time user feedback alongside behavioral analytics data.

While unitQ already provides organizations' with AI-driven, real-time actionable insights into what their users are saying in real time across all user feedback channels, our latest milestone empowers our customers with real-time actionable insights about how their customers are using their products and services.

This first-of-its-kind unified approach helps organizations identify correlations between user behavior and user feedback, providing an even deeper understanding of customers' needs and preferences. unitQ now becomes even more powerful when integrated with product analytics software like Amplitude by further breaking down the walls between product, engineering and customer experience teams.

Understanding User Behavior
Integrating product analytics with unitQ solves a big problem for organizations — understanding what drives user behavior with detailed insights into product usage patterns and performance metrics, from conversion paths to drop off points.

"Capturing user actions with Amplitude, in combination with user-feedback platform unitQ, empowers businesses to understand how their customers use their products as well as where there are points of friction across the user journey," says Brandon Khoo, Amplitude's Project Manager. "This combination gives product, engineering and customer experience leaders bi-directional feedback so that they can build products informed by what users say and their actions, increasing both customer satisfaction and the effectiveness of product roadmaps."

unitQ's Latest Inventions, Enhancements
The rollout of the unitQ-Amplitude integration follows a spate of unitQ innovations and product advancements.

Among them, they include:

• The debut of unitQ's advanced AI-powered software to instantly transcribe organizations' call center recordings, customer surveys and conversation bots — data that is transformed into real-time actionable insights to empower businesses to automate and elevate their product quality.
• The introduction of unitQ GPT; unitQ GPT is the world's first generative AI engine for measuring the quality of an organization's products, services and experiences and harnesses unitQ's proprietary AI models to extract instant meaning from support tickets, surveys, app reviews, social media posts and product engagement data so organizations can connect the dots between what users say and do in real time.
• Engineering root cause analysis (RCA) coupled with unitQ GPT empowers engineering teams to quickly identify and address the root causes of user-reported issues. This AI-driven approach not only streamlines the RCA process but also ensures that user feedback is central to product development and improvement strategies.

With our unitQ-Amplitude integration, organizations can easily identify the correlation of product quality issues and the impact on any defined cohort — a group of users with shared characteristics. Simply ask unitGPT a question and get immediate answers based on granularly categorized, AI-driven user insights.

• What cohort of users have churned the most and why?
• What cohort of users tried a new feature and why?
• What are my power users saying about our latest feature or beta?
• What cohort of users are most likely to churn and why?
• What features do inactive users like and dislike, and what bugs do they want fixed?
• What features can we implement to upsell customers?
• What user actions are good for engagement, improving conversion?
• What user actions are not good for engagement, hindering conversion?

"The use of advanced AI solutions like unitQ GPT in tandem with product analytics software such as Amplitude is setting a new standard for product quality by offering greater possibilities for companies to understand their customers to deliver exceptional experiences," says Christian Wiklund, unitQ CEO.

Seamlessly Connect Amplitude to unitQ
Our Amplitude integration connects seamlessly with unitQ. We have a growing number of out-of-the-box integrations and are adding more all the time. Contact unitQ if you're looking to integrate a product analytics tool or other user-feedback data source not on our growing roster.

Enabling marketers to accelerate first-party data strategies and thrive in a world without third-party cookies

OneTrust, the market-defining leader for trust intelligence, today announced it is partnering with Adobe to offer the capabilities of OneTrust Universal Consent and Preference Management with the Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP), part of Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe was recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner^® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms. We believe, through the partnership, OneTrust will empower marketers and data stewards to cultivate trust by giving customers control of how data is used by brands and increase marketing ROI by powering personalized experiences that reflect an individual's preferences, all while automating privacy compliance with global laws.

The integration of OneTrust UCPM with Adobe Real-Time CDP will enable marketers to navigate changes in how they capture, access, and activate data, driven by the deprecation of third-party cookies and proliferation of data privacy laws, while meeting consumer demand for heightened personalization. Now, brands can combine customer data from all of their channels into unified profiles that also include customers' communication and privacy preferences. Any changes to a customer's preferences are instantly stored and reflected in future interactions with a brand. This will provide the foundation for marketers to capture, store, enforce, and activate consent—at scale—to deliver highly personalized and consistent experiences leveraging first-party data.

According to Gartner, "First-party data can strengthen customer relationships by enabling companies to provide more personalized, relevant experiences."¹ Gartner also states, "Central to most privacy laws is the challenge of providing users with clarity and control over their personal information and how it is used. Digital marketing leaders need a clear overview of the consent and preference management ecosystem to design experiences that meet this challenge."²

"In today's digital landscape, where privacy concerns and the demand for personalized experiences intersect, first-party data emerges as the critical path forward," explained Blake Brannon, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at OneTrust. "By partnering with Adobe, we're paving the way for brands to excel in striking this balance, transforming how they connect with customers, respect their preferences, and ultimately, achieve a higher marketing ROI."

"Organizations rely on Adobe Real-Time CDP to unify disparate data into real-time profiles, that can then be activated across any marketing channel," said Ryan Fleisch, Senior Director at Adobe. "The joint capabilities of OneTrust and Adobe are an important unlock for marketers, enabling teams to drive personalization at scale while also building trusted, consent-driven relationships with customers." 

OneTrust's integration with Adobe Real-Time CDP enables marketers to:

• Enrich customer profiles and deepen their understanding of customer behavior and interest by collecting and storing customer-provided preferences
• Deliver personalized experiences at scale using audience segments built on first-party data and consent
• Adhere to data privacy requirements, build trust with customers, and minimize disruption to marketing workflows with automated consent management

Dive deeper into OneTrust and Adobe:

• Attend the webinar: Permission-Based Personalization: The Power of OneTrust and Adobe
• Read the blog: Powering Privacy-First Personalized Experiences
• Visit OneTrust at booth #249 at Adobe Summit, March 26-28. Attend the breakout session with OneTrust and Adobe, Permission-Based Personalization: Integrating Consent, on March 27 from 2:30-3:30 pm PDT

Merkle, dentsu's leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company, announced the launch of Intelligent Messaging, its end-to-end messaging solution, to create unified brand experiences across touchpoints and channels by blending AI assistance and human interaction. With Intelligent Messaging, Merkle can create turnkey chat experiences, including across social and messaging platforms, delivering always-on conversational interactions throughout the entire customer journey.

"Brands are seeking ways to make experiences more personal, make shopping more seamless, and shorten the path to purchase," said James Riess, SVP, General Manager, loyalty and messaging experience at Merkle. "Our new global solution, Intelligent Messaging, can be seamlessly integrated into existing plans, enabling brands to forge deeper connections with customers, enhance customer satisfaction, and generate lifetime value."

The Intelligent Messaging solution, part of Merkle's world-leading CRM & Messaging offering and incubated by the dentsu Integrated Solutions group, modularly connects across six key service areas:

• Intelligent Messaging Blueprint: Craft a tailored messaging strategy that shapes the customer experience for future-state marketing.
• Conversational Design & Experiences: Create messaging that matters with intuitive, human-like persona development, conversation flows, branching narrative and behavior-based experiences.
• AI + Human-Powered Assistance: Amplify assistance, improve performance and support with AI-powered chatbots, synthetic humans, and our human-powered team 24/7.
• Click to Message Ads and Marketing Messages: Enable customers to click directly from an ad to a 1:1 message via Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp for an always-on 1:1 connection and lead generation.
• Technology Integration: Seamlessly integrate with industry-leading ecommerce and CRM platforms including Salesforce, Adobe, Braze, and more.
• First-To-Market Advantage: Through partnership with Meta, gain early access to alpha and beta products along with technology updates and tailored solutions to drive innovation and growth.

"Intelligent Messaging seamlessly integrates media and CRM, providing a holistic approach to customer interaction. By leveraging advanced technology, businesses can meet consumers in their preferred communication channels and deliver connected and personalized experiences, ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty," said Val Vacante, VP Solutions Innovation, dentsu. "We were excited to see the solution deliver increased engagement, conversion, and zero-party data collection with our clients William Grant & Sons and WWF in collaboration with dentsu X, Carat, and iProspect."

Dentsu and Meta recently joined forces to form a global Meta Messaging Alliance to provide dentsu, Merkle, and Meta clients with access to alpha and beta products across Meta Business Messaging platforms. Dentsu is also the first global agency network solution provider for WhatsApp Business. The partnership with WhatsApp allows dentsu and Merkle clients to take advantage of the huge engagement and conversion potential of this channel by delivering seamless customer journeys across media, customer engagement, and service.