Cloudinary, the image and video technology platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, today announced a series of new intelligent image optimization capabilities, including Automatic Crop (c_auto), the only solution on the market to ensure a contextually consistent, picture-perfect crop for every image at incredible scale. The company also introduced its latest generative AI innovation, Image Enhance (e_enhance), which automatically improves image quality and produces professional-looking results, as well as Enhanced Downscaling, which ensures the highest quality remains when images are reduced for use as thumbnails or previews. 

Delivering picture-perfect visual assets to online audiences is critical for any digital business but cropping every image for every digital experience scenario would be impossible for brands to do manually – especially for those managing millions of visual assets. More than 10,000 brands and 1.5 million developers rely on Cloudinary to ensure they deliver fully optimized and performant images and videos. Cloudinary’s newest set of optimization features deliver on the fast and flawless promise that its customers such as Adidas, Etsy, Bass Pro Shops and Fiverr have come to expect.

Cloudinary’s latest optimization innovations enable users to automatically:

• Crop complex images such as product images featuring human models and sports-action photos. Automatic Crop (c_auto) delivers unrivaled intelligence and simplicity and is a complement to Cloudinary's best-in-class AI Auto Gravity (g_auto), a popular capability that ensures the most interesting areas of an image remain the image’s main focus.
• Turn low-quality images into professional-grade assets by solving common issues such as exposure balancing, white balancing and color vividness. With Image Enhance (e_enhance), brands can trust that every image on web- and mobile-responsive sites looks and performs optimally.
• Create picture-perfect image thumbnails and previews through Enhanced Downscaling, which preserves more details when reducing image dimensions.
• Deliver all images and videos in the optimal format and size by default based on the user’s device, browser and bandwidth - including new and modern formats such as AVIF, JPEG XL and AV1. Auto-Optimize eliminates the risk of poorly-performing images and videos that harm page-load times and negatively impact the user experience, while also helping to reduce a brand’s digital carbon footprint. Tests of the new feature have shown Cloudinary’s video API is the fastest in the market for delivering optimized videos across the full range of viewing contexts.

“Cloudinary’s media science and AI expertise empowers us to build the most complete set of solutions for delivering dynamic and picture-perfect visual experiences at scale,” said Tal Lev-Ami, co-founder and CTO, Cloudinary. “The intelligent image optimizations announced today further reinforce Cloudinary as the most complete platform for automating the complex and time-consuming optimizations required to engage modern consumers.”

Kajabi, the leading creator commerce platform, today announced a collaboration with Adobe Express and the public launch of Creator Studio a generative AI tool that, in seconds, enables creators to turn a single video into more than 40 pieces of content across social posts, blog posts, email and more. As part of this unique tech team-up, Adobe Express—the all-in-one AI content creation tool—is now directly integrated into Kajabi's Creator Studio, pairing the power of generative AI with high-impact editing and design capabilities, empowering creators to accelerate the growth trajectory of their online ventures.

Since the Creator Studio beta launch in May 2023, Kajabi users have created over 50,000 pieces of content and reduced their time spent on content creation by over 90%. Unlike any other tool on the market, Creator Studio is fueled by over 13 years of marketing data and leverages these insights to create the most optimal marketing campaigns, quickly and easily for creators.

To date, the innovative new tool has helped Kajabi creators:

• Unlock 40+ types of marketing content, including social media clips, emails, mini-courses, community posts, and more.
• Build a polished brand and profitable business with Adobe Express' editing tool without marketing, design, or video editing experience.
• Create share-worthy content for social media from a course lesson, coaching call, or webinar to help creators create marketing gold, then share it directly to social media in just a few clicks.
• Grow and convert audiences using a full-scale marketing funnel to turn leads into customers.

Top-earning creators use AI tools, like Creator Studio, to increase their marketing content output and build their online businesses. According to Kajabi's State of Creators 2024 report, 72% of six-figure creators use AI tools at least weekly, compared to only 54% of lower-earning creators. By using Creator Studio, creators and entrepreneurs save over 20 hours a month and reduce time spent on marketing by 90%.

"Creator Studio is a game-changer for creators," said Graham Cochrane, author, speaker, and podcaster. "Its user-friendly features have reduced my workload and significantly simplified my content creation efforts. On top of that, it's allowed me to get more mileage out of my existing content. The time I've saved with Creator Studio is now being used to build out my long-term strategy and accelerate my business growth."

Powered by the Adobe Express Embed SDK, the new integration of Adobe Express in Creator Studio gives Kajabi creators the access to tools and capabilities that will reduce the time, effort, and resources required to work across different platforms for each stage of the creative journey. Users will start in Creator Studio by uploading a video and selecting the content types they'd like to create, then they'll utilize the all-in-one editor in Adobe Express to enhance the editing process by adding effects, animations, AI-powered text effects, images, and more—all within one platform. With Adobe Express video editing tools, Kajabi creators will have access for the first time, to quickly and easily cut, crop, and trim video footage as well as add music from hundreds of royalty-free Adobe Stock soundtracks. Additional product integrations between Adobe Express and Kajabi are in development to support the growth of creator businesses.

"Product innovation lies at the heart of Kajabi's mission. As we continue to level the playing field for aspiring entrepreneurs, leveraging generative AI remains a pivotal part of our long-term strategy," said Ahad Khan, CEO of Kajabi. "Our collaboration with Adobe Express exemplifies our shared goal of empowering ambitious creators with top-tier creation tools and cutting-edge technology. Together, we're redefining creators' approaches to their craft, enhancing their productivity, and, most importantly, expediting their business growth. With Creator Studio, we're helping creators save time and resources, enabling them to channel their energy where it truly counts: creating content and building business they control."

"We're excited to be teaming up with Kajabi to bring the best of Adobe Express – including social video creation – to creators at a time when content demand is exploding," said Aubrey Cattell, Vice President, Developer Platform & Partner Ecosystem, Adobe. "This new integration, powered by the Adobe Express Embed SDK, demonstrates the combination of Adobe's industry-leading AI content creation app and vast creator expertise from Kajabi to help users of all levels both generate and edit standout content without disrupting their creative workflows."

The collaboration with Adobe Express follows recent news that YouTube creators Colin and Samir have partnered with Kajabi to help more creators take ownership of their incomes. These moves demonstrate Kajabi's commitment to making the creator economy more accessible to everyone and increasing the revenue potential for all creators and digital entrepreneurs.

In 2023, Kajabi announced it had surpassed $6 billion in creator revenue just a few months after reaching the $5 billion mark. Additionally, the creator commerce platform launched its own payment processing solution, Kajabi Payments, and the branded mobile app, allowing creators to build their own mobile app experiences without technical complications or a high price tag. So far, in 2024, Kajabi released its comprehensive annual 'State of Creators' report revealing key trends in the creator economy, including the rise of creator ownership, the diversification of income streams, and creator forecasts for 2024.

Trust Stamp, the Privacy-First Identity Company^TM has announced the commercial release of its new age-estimation technology using deep-learning algorithms.
                                               
Andrew Gowasack, Trust Stamp’s President, commented, “Understanding the age of online users is critical not only to ensuring that services and content appropriate for mature audiences are not accessed by minors but also ensuring that services that are expressly designed to allow young people to interact are not infiltrated by adult users. This is increasingly being recognized by legislative initiatives, and in some cases, algorithmic-based age estimation is expressly being authorized. As with any product of this type, our technology cannot provide an exact age for a user but does provide a confidence level as to an age range allowing platform operators to focus document-based age verification on a subset of their users.”

Andrew Gowasack went on to say, “We recently participated in a bake-off against an industry leader in the age verification field and based upon the performance of our deep-learning technology in that test, we are now negotiating the first commercial implementation for the technology. We can deliver this technology as a SaaS application through our Orchestration Layer, as an on-prem installation, via an SDK for integration into mobile applications or, potentially, as a stand-alone application that can run on the edge without Internet access. Although our first potential customer is an online platform, the demand extends to offline venues and can remove the need for more intrusive in-person requirements. This is a very substantial and fast-growing market opportunity for us and an excellent compliment to our existing identity authentication services.”    

LivePerson, the enterprise leader in digital customer conversations, and Infinity, the award-winning call analytics platform, today announced a partnership to help brands better personalize digital experiences through the power of conversational data and intelligence.

The new partnership drives enhanced personalization and measurable ROI by making it easy to connect attribution data across voice calls and digital messaging conversations. This bi-directional attribution — inclusive of conversations handled with AI and automation — makes it easier to understand a customer's end-to-end, omnichannel journey with a brand. By connecting this data across channels at the individual interaction and aggregate levels, brands can:

• Strengthen their visibility into online-to-offline engagements
• Optimize marketing spend with improved first-touch attribution data
• Better understand factors driving escalation from digital to voice
• Improve sales and service outcomes through more personalized experiences

"According to LivePerson's State of Customer Conversations 2024 report, the vast majority of consumers want the option to seamlessly switch between calls and digital conversations depending on their preference in the moment," said Dan Sincavage, Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships at LivePerson. "The combination of LivePerson's industry-leading digital customer conversation platform and analytics with Infinity's powerful call intelligence allows brands to unlock an exciting and high-impact set of data and insights that make conversations across these channels more powerful than ever, accelerating their digital transformation."

LivePerson customers have seen benefits including up to 25% boosts in customer satisfaction and 30% reductions in operating costs, and Infinity customers have seen benefits including up to 45% increases in phone leads and 64% reductions in cost of acquisition.

"This is just the beginning for our partnership with LivePerson," said Warren Newbert, CEO of Infinity. "We're already making it possible to attribute calls and ROI to digital conversations, and we're excited to offer even more valuable insights to marketers, sales teams, CX professionals, and contact centers as our partnership progresses. I'm exceptionally excited that Infinity has found the right partner to bring our services to digital conversations"

Infinity's Vice President of Partnerships, Kris Wagland, added, "Our partnership and integrated solution with LivePerson enables mutual clients to greatly improve ROI from marketing spend, while optimizing the experiences they deliver at scale for their clients across channels. This is a win-win for brands and their customers — and it's indicative of the bold vision we share with LivePerson for the opportunities within the conversational intelligence space."

Company growth highlights commitment to improving customers’ productivity

Mindtickle, the market-leading revenue productivity platform, announced today the appointment of veteran marketer Joan Jenkins as Chief Marketing Officer. This strategic move is part of the company’s continued growth momentum driven by new product innovations, market leadership, AI advancements, and significant customer wins and expansion. 

With over two decades of marketing experience, Jenkins brings expertise in leading high-performance teams and fueling growth for innovative companies. Before joining Mindtickle, she was the CMO at Blueshift and held executive positions with several industry-leading companies, including Druva, Informatica, Oracle, and Cisco. As Mindtickle’s CMO, Jenkins will be essential in driving customer outcomes and increasing market adoption of Mindtickle’s revenue productivity platform.

“We’re at an incredible inflection point in sales and revenue enablement, and customers are seeing increased business results from investments in this area,” said Jenkins. “Mindtickle has consistently led the way in offering cutting-edge solutions for revenue productivity. I am thrilled to collaborate with the team to drive exponential growth and exceptional customer experiences.”

Jenkins’ appointment comes at a time when marketing has become a key stakeholder in evaluating and buying revenue enablement solutions. According to Mindtickle’s CRM, there was a 367% rise last year in CMOs and Product Marketing leaders becoming a part of buying committees for revenue productivity solutions like Asset Hub and Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs). In the financial year 2023-2024, these two solutions saw a 74% increase in customers while new ARR bookings grew by 233% YoY.

“As companies continue to utilize sales enablement tools to increase revenue productivity and close more deals, Mindtickle continues to stand at the forefront of the industry with innovative product updates and strategic acquisitions designed to provide more usability for its customers,” said Eric Anderson, President of Mindtickle. “With the addition of Joan’s expertise in demand generation, brand, product marketing, and customer marketing to our team, Mindtickle is positioned to enter its next growth phase as a leader in revenue productivity.”

In 2023, Mindtickle focused on updating and expanding its platform to provide a holistic revenue productivity platform to enable revenue teams on every level – from sales training to buyer enablement. Part of this mission was driven by acquiring EnableUs, a buyer enablement provider, to expand its Digital Sales Rooms offering and provide a more efficient and personal B2B buying experience. Following the acquisition, Mindtickle turned to building out its suite of generative AI offerings with Mindtickle Copilot, designed to help revenue organizations analyze team performance, deliver targeted coaching, and close more deals.

As proof of its exponential, continued growth, Mindtickle furthered its standing as the industry’s foremost thought leader through the following:

• The release of its third annual State of Sales Productivity Report, which analyzed activity from more than 400 Mindtickle customers and allowed organizations to benchmark themselves against best-in-class revenue enablement programs.
• Forrester Sales Readiness Solution Wave: Mindtickle was named as a leader in Forrester’s first-ever Sales Readiness Solution Wave.
• 2023 Brandon Hall Group Excellence in Technology Awards: Mindtickle won Gold for Best Advance in Sales Enablement and Performance Tools in the Brandon Hall Awards.
• Deloitte India Fast 50: Mindtickle was named in Deloitte India’s Fast 50 list for MarTech.

Generative artificial intelligence, combined with deeply integrated and specific healthcare workflows, delivers powerful self-service to improve experiences and reduce the burden on human contact center agents 

• Talkdesk introduces Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare, the next generation of the company’s virtual agent, specifically tuned for healthcare use cases, powered by generative artificial intelligence.

• Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare connects with electronic health records (EHR) and other key systems to autonomously resolve complex needs and questions throughout the patient journey, from patient access and symptom checking to revenue cycle and patient services.

• Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Cloud™, the company’s purpose-built healthcare solution, now supports customers integrating with multiple EHR systems in their contact centers.

Talkdesk®, Inc., a global AI-powered contact center leader for enterprises of all sizes, continues to make it faster and easier for organizations to take advantage of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to unlock powerful new efficiencies in the contact center. Accelerating its vision of autonomous customer experience (CX) and building on the recent announcement of Talkdesk Autopilot, the company introduced Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare, the next generation of its iconic virtual agent specifically developed to handle patient and member use cases. Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare was launched today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Global Health Conference and Exhibition.

Talkdesk Autopilot is available across chat and voice channels in the Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Cloud™, the company’s purpose-built platform that helps organizations create synchronized, personalized, and radically convenient experiences for healthcare patients, members, and caregivers. Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare supports the whole patient journey through healthcare-specific integrations, workflows, and GenAI models developed based on the company’s extensive experience with healthcare organizations. The result is a connected, intelligent patient and member assistant proficient in resolving consumers’ most common questions and needs.

While many call center automation solutions focus on deflecting callers to other online tools, Talkdesk Autopilot can perform tasks that patients request and seamlessly loop in human agents when necessary. The result is frictionless interactions and improved patient acquisition and loyalty.

Patients and members call or chat with their providers and health plans for many important reasons before and after clinical visits. Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare now automates an expanded set of use cases that support the whole patient journey — including new patient acquisition, making and managing appointments, completing PCI-compliant payments, finding a nearby clinic, and managing claims and prior authorizations. In addition to leveraging deep and direct integrations with Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, the tool now integrates with digital triage and symptom-checking platforms, including Infermedica and Isabel Health. It connects with physician and location directories to help patients find the right provider and directs plan members to the best level of care.

Talkdesk has led the healthcare contact center market since 2021 by directly integrating with EHR systems. Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Cloud is available in the integration marketplaces for leading EHR platforms, including athenahealth, Epic, and Oracle Health (formerly Cerner). Today, Talkdesk announced support for multiple EHR systems for Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Cloud. Now, the purpose-built contact center solution for healthcare can read and update information from different EHRs for customers who may use distinct platforms for various contact centers, specialties, or facilities during a conversation for greater efficiency, accuracy, and personalization.

Supporting Quotes

Tiago Paiva, chief executive officer and founder of Talkdesk, said: “Talkdesk continues to invest in meeting healthcare organizations’ unique and important needs with purpose-built solutions and integrations. Combining the power of GenAI with deep and sophisticated healthcare workflows makes Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare a landmark innovation that helps fully resolve, not just deflect, the needs of patients and caregivers throughout their journey. We’re proud to work with great customers every day to deliver a better experience, reduce the burden on human staff, and deliver value to the entire healthcare system.”

Jeff Kaplan, vice president of Patient Access at Memorial Healthcare System, stated: “Our consumers increasingly expect convenience and ease when engaging with their healthcare provider. Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare has helped us automate common patient calls and chats, freeing our staff to focus on helping our patients and families with the most complex needs. AI has amazing potential to help healthcare, but it’s critical to partner with vendors who understand the industry and can collaborate to build solutions to fit its unique requirements. We’re excited to continue to innovate with Talkdesk.”

We want each person who uses the DoorDash platform to have a safe and positive experience every time. The vast majority of Dashers, customers, and merchants do the right thing and treat others with respect. It’s one reason why safety incidents between users are extremely rare, with more than 99.99% of deliveries on our platform being completed without any safety-related incident at all. Even so, we’re constantly exploring and testing new safety features and products.

As part of these ongoing efforts, we’re excited to announce the launch of SafeChat+, a new feature that leverages the power of artificial intelligence to help make our platform even safer and provide a better experience for everyone.

With SafeChat+, we’re utilizing AI to review in-app conversations to detect and prevent verbal abuse or harassment. If SafeChat+ detects an inappropriate or abusive conversation between a consumer and Dasher, Dashers will be given the option to quickly cancel the order without impacting ratings. If the order is already completed, the feature will automatically end any further chat to help prevent the situation from escalating. If a Dasher uses inappropriate or abusive language with a customer during a delivery, the customer can reach out to support via chat or phone to report the incident and receive assistance.

Our Trust & Safety team will investigate all incidents identified by the new tool and take appropriate actions to enforce our policies, which strictly prohibit any verbal abuse or harassment.

This new feature will address verbal abuse or harassment, which is the most common safety incident and is now rolled out to all in-app chats between consumers and Dashers - meaning it is reviewing more than 1,400 messages a minute with speed and at scale for signals of inappropriate communications. The feature covers dozens of languages including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin.

DoorDash takes privacy extremely seriously and that's why the new feature does not access any personal user information and only looks at the content of the message to identify inappropriate, abusive, or harassing language.

In the past year alone, DoorDash has launched more than several new safety features including Real-Time Safety Alerts to help keep Dasher’s out of harm’s way, SafeDash™ Check-In to give Dashers greater peace of mind while dashing, Location Sharing to allow Dashers to share their location in real-time with their trusted contacts, Porch Light Reminders to help make dashing at night even safer and easier, and quicker and easier safety reporting from within the app.

 With this long-awaited feature, ShareGate users have a single, trusted tool to simplify and accelerate migration projects 

ShareGate by Workleap, the out-of-the-box management solution for Microsoft 365, now includes tenant-to-tenant mailbox migration, to lighten the load of big migration projects with simplicity and ease. As a leader in SharePoint and Teams migration, with the addition of Exchange Online migrations, ShareGate by Workleap is now the complete package for streamlined tenant-to-tenant transitions to Microsoft 365.

The new mailbox migration feature allows IT teams to efficiently transfer mailboxes, calendars and contacts between tenants with just a few clicks. Built to tackle major pain points with Microsoft native tools and accelerate complex migration projects, ShareGate's intuitive interface provides robust governance, planning and visibility controls throughout migrations.

"At Workleap, we understand the unique obstacles IT teams face managing Microsoft 365. With the addition of tenant-to-tenant mailbox migration, one of our users' most requested features, we're addressing the top migration workload beyond SharePoint and lifting a burden off our customers' shoulders," said Benjamin Niaulin, VP of product at Workleap. "This update is just another way we're living out our philosophy of enabling users to achieve more with less."

ShareGate by Workleap's new mailbox migration offering takes the complexity out of moving to Microsoft 365, so businesses can pivot faster than the speed of change. Key features include:

• An intuitive user interface.
• Messages, calendar and contact migrations.
• Maintaining of essential attributes, such as attachments, folders and categories.
• Preservation of server-side rules.
• Easy planning for a sequenced migration with customized date-frames to migrate only what you need.
• Automated or adjustable mailbox mapping.
• Pre-migration summary and post-migration reporting.
• No scripting or coding required for a fast, painless migration.

Over 75,000 IT professionals trust ShareGate by Workleap to simplify daily operations for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint environments. With an emphasis on consolidation, modernization, governance, visibility and business continuity, ShareGate's intuitive yet powerful tools help IT administrators worldwide maximize ROI while eliminating platform complexities.