DataGuard, a leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company focused on Data Protection, Information Security, and Compliance, welcomes Christine Walch as Vice President Marketing. In her new role, Berlin-based Walch will help DataGuard scale its go-to-market operations and further solidify its position as industry frontrunners in the rapidly growing Security and Compliance space.

Walch has a proven track record of building and scaling marketing operations in fast-growing companies and joins DataGuard from Quentic, a SaaS solution provider in the environmental, health, and safety management sector (EHS). She built Quentic’s marketing teams and led them throughout the company’s growth journey over the last twelve years, building a vastly successful EHS brand across more than 90 countries. Before Quentic, Walch spent over four years handling marketing at ib vogt, an international utility-scale solar development company. She holds a degree in Business Administration for Marketing Management and is the mother of two daughters.

"I am excited to join DataGuard at this pivotal stage of its growth journey. Working with highly talented, driven, and kind people as we strive to achieve our purpose-driven product vision – protecting the people behind the data by helping companies worldwide mitigate risks, become secure, and remain compliant – is inspiring. In today's complex data and artificial intelligence landscape, our SaaS platform plays a crucial role in solving data governance challenges. It is immensely satisfying to be part of a team addressing such pressing needs," says Walch.

Walch reports to Thomas Regier, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of DataGuard. He says: "We are thrilled to welcome Christine to the team. She brings a wealth of marketing and leadership experience to DataGuard, perfectly aligning with our mission to reshape the security and compliance landscape. Christine has successfully built international teams and scaled go-to-market operations in adjacent industries. She will play a pivotal role in shaping our brand and positioning, driving meaningful customer interactions, and fuelling DataGuard’s growth."

The "New Horizon" ad is one of the first Ecoprod-certified productions in France

The new pan-European advertising campaign "Care For Where You Live: New Horizon" from LG Electronics (LG), which is dedicated to the "THERMA V™" air to water heat pump, has just been awarded the two-star certification by the independent label Ecoprod. It certifies films, ads and audiovisual programmes that are produced in an eco-friendly way.

Since helping to build a more sustainable world also means adopting more environmentally friendly communication practices, LG has decided to promote its new air to water heat pump model, "THERMA V™^" – an eco-friendly product from its Air Solution division – through a green production. 

Guided by the new Ecoprod guidelines, which set out 80 necessary actions to reduce the environmental impact of creating audiovisual productions (preparation, filming and post-production), the production team has had to adapt, meticulously planning the pre-production stage, the choice of filming locations to ease logistics and reduce travel, and the contracting of local talent. To meet the challenges of reducing waste, proactive measures have been adopted, such as banning single-use items, using reusable materials where possible and harnessing the circular economy for decorative elements and design. 

Following an audit of the measures implemented by Afnor, LG's "Care For Where You Live: New Horizon" campaign achieved an eco-production score of 78.5%, earning the Ecoprod two-star certification in the process. The campaign also played its part in the Ecoprod label pilot phase, providing feedback to help adjust and validate the common assessment criteria for the standard.  

This pan-European digital campaign has been disseminated in ten European countries: Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic.  

By producing this advert in an eco-friendly way, LG is promoting responsible filming practices in line with its environmental and social commitments, and paving the way for the adoption of virtuous practices throughout the industry.  

MiniTool Software Limited has released a new version of its video editing software – MiniTool MovieMaker 7.2.0 with new features, resources, elements, and improved user experience.

Changes in the new version:

• Copy and paste a single element on the timeline.
• Newly added effects for video editing.
• Newly added music resources and emoji/explosion/love & weeding elements.

Copy and Paste Feature Improves Work Efficiency

MiniTool MovieMaker version 7.2.0 supports to copy and paste a single element on the timeline track:

• A video clip together with its effects, filter, or motion.
• A photo together with its effects, filter, or motion.
• An audio clip.
• A caption.
• An element.

All you need to do is right-clicking on the target element and selecting Copy. Then, move the playhead on the timeline to the target place, right-click on the track there, and choose Paste.

Therefore, you can quickly create a video that includes repeat elements, which greatly improves work efficiency.

Completely New Effects Make the Videos More Attractive

This time, a whole new category of effects is added to MiniTool MovieMaker 7.2.0 for better video editing.

• Overlay: including sparkle and frame etc. types.
• Distortion: containing shake, VCR distortion, water ripple, etc. types.
• Glitch: including fuzzy effect.
• Love: containing heartbeat effect.
• Opening & Closing: including black, white, horizontal, and vertical close or open effects.
• Particle: containing fire particle, slitstretch, and smokelight effects.

Just select your desired and proper effects to decorate your future videos. A single video or photo clip can add multiple effects.

New Music and Animated Stickers Give You More Choices

The new version of MiniTool MovieMaker still added many new songs and animations to its resource library for you to choose from. For example, the new love stickers and emojis can help your video to express emotions better.

120fps Surreal Picture Quality Recreates a Future Sci-Fi World Bursting with Infinite Survival-Genre Imagination 

Pixelworks, Inc. a leading provider of visual processing solutions, today announced that the latest release of the award winning mobile game Earth: Revival integrates Pixelworks' Rendering Accelerator SDK to significantly enhance the visual quality for mobile gaming. Coupled with a Pixelworks visual procecssor, the Rendering Accelerator SDK works as a bridge to deliver an exceptional 120fps visual experience on mobile devices with low power consumption, immersing players in a more authentic and vivid future sci-fi world.

Earth: Revival is set in the early 22^nd century. Faced with the rampaging of alien creatures, the technological metropolis crumbles into ruins, bringing production to a standstill and resulting in an energy crisis and ecological devastation. As survivors of this catastrophe, players must seek survival resources to ensure their own safety, while also taking on the role of future warriors, uniting to eradicate the alien threat and restore their homeland as well as civilization.

In the context of Earth: Revival, the key to creating a truly immersive experience begins with a well-crafted virtual world and storyline, which is then made feel real through the visual presentation of survival experiences and combat scenes. Capturing the desired realism, including a sense of presence for players, requires the delivery of high frame rate graphics with consistently smooth and clear visuals over a prolonged period. However, achieving this level of visual performance frequently exceeds the rendering capabilities of smartphone GPUs, leading to issues such as excessive power and battery consumption and device overheating when playing high frame rate mobile games.

To overcome these performance challenges associated with high frame rate mobile gaming, Pixelworks engaged in a deep collaboration with the technical team of Earth: Revival. With the integration of the IRX Rendering Acceleration SDK into Earth: Revival, a visual processing channel is established between the game engine and the rendering acceleration processor inside the mobile device, which offloads rendering pressure from the GPU and ensures stable and high-quality visuals are delivered to the display, while also improving power consumption for extended mobile gaming. Players can activate the IRX gaming experience through a dedicated button in the game interface. Additionally, developers can dynamically deploy rendering power resources based on the diverse types and gameplay characteristics of various games, enabling the game creator to fully and reliably convey their artistic intent.

"Earth: Revival aspires to be more than just a fun game for its players—it envisions an immersive and tangible future world infused with science fiction," said William, Producer of Earth: Revival. "We are pleased to collaborate with Pixelworks on this game, bringing the imaginative future world to life on mobile devices in a more authentic manner. We will continue to optimize the gaming experience while ensuring top-notch game graphics, providing players with a more smooth and stable visual experience on mobile devices."

"As a sci-fi survival game, Earth: Revival embodies the development team's high regard and contemplation for science fiction, whether in the shaping of the worldview, or the design of the storyline and visual scenes," said Jun Fang, Senior Marketing Director of Pixelworks. "We hope that Pixelworks can help game development teams better deliver their ingenious and imaginative content on smartphones to a broad mobile gaming audience. Pixelworks looks forward to fully utilizing its visual processing expertise and leveraging its IRX rendering acceleration technology to enable more mobile gamers to immerse themselves in the exploration of their own sci-fi future world of Earth: Revival."

Veritonic, the industry’s comprehensive audio analytics and research platform, announced today that Audacy has renewed its partnership with the company. The continued partnership will allow Audacy to provide their clients and advertising partners with insightful and comprehensive data that can be used to optimize their audio campaigns, resulting in an increase in both reach and ROI.

“Measuring the impact of our total Audio campaigns — including radio, streaming and podcast advertising— with Veritonic allows us to show the power of Audacy’s content in connecting with audiences and mobilizing customers,” said Idil Cakim, Senior Vice President of Research and Insights, Audacy. “We’re thrilled to continue our partnership and enable our clients and advertising partners to leverage audio to achieve the utmost in competitive edge, reach, and ROI.”

“We take great pride in our ongoing partnership with Audacy, supporting their clients and advertising partners with unparalleled data & insights to inform their audio strategies," said Scott Simonelli, CEO of Veritonic. "Through the utilization of our creative measurement and brand lift solutions, Audacy can continue to empower their clients with the data required to fine-tune their campaigns and ensure a robust return on their investment in the channel."

Veritonic’s measurement platforms and tools enable Audacy to pressure test the sonic qualities of the company’s clients’ messaging and advise them on the optimal sounds that will generate positive emotions, recall and action. Audacy uses Veritonic’s audio-first Brand Lift and Creative Measurement solutions to measure the impact of their clients’ audio campaigns on key brand performance metrics, across the funnel.

The studies provide a deeper understanding of how audio contributes to achieving a client’s goals in terms of emotional resonance, awareness, favorability, intent, and recall. By equipping brands with these tools for validating their investments, Veritonic helps mitigate risks and enhance the performance and ROI of audio across various formats, including streaming audio and podcast advertising.

Veritonic’s AI-powered Creative Measurement solution provides brands and agencies with robust pre-market insights that delve into the emotional resonance, recall, and engagement of audio content. With this actionable information in hand, brands and agencies can optimize their content for maximum impact, ensuring that every element of their audio campaign captures the attention and hearts of their target audience.

The exclusive provider of independent and holistic audio data and analytics, the Veritonic platform is supporting the audio strategies of leading brands, agencies, and platforms around the world. 

The first scraper-specific product tailored to the unique characteristics of scraping attacks.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. the cloud company that powers and protects life online, today announced the availability of Content Protector, a product that stops scraping attacks without blocking the good traffic that companies need to enhance their business.

Scraper bots are a critical and often productive part of the commerce ecosystem. These bots search for new content, highlight products in comparison sites, and gather updated product information to share with customers. Unfortunately, scrapers also get used for harmful purposes such as competitive undercutting, surveillance before inventory hoarding attacks, and counterfeiting goods and websites. Scrapers also ping sites 24/7 unless stopped — so they can degrade site performance, which in turn frustrates consumers and causes them to abandon their visits. In addition, scrapers have become much more evasive and sophisticated over the past few years.

Akamai Content Protector helps detect and mitigate evasive scrapers that steal content for malicious purposes. It enables improved site performance, an enhanced user experience and protection of intellectual property while facilitating significantly better detections and fewer false negatives without increasing the rate of false positives. The product is designed for companies that need to protect their reputation and revenue potential. It offers tailored detections that include:

• Protocol-level assessment: Protocol fingerprinting checks how visitors connect to your site to ensure they're legitimate. It evaluates how the client establishes the connection with the server at the different layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model — verifying that the parameters negotiated align with the one expected from the most common web browsers and mobile applications.
• Application-level assessment: Evaluates if the client can run some business logic written in JavaScript. When the client runs JavaScript, it collects the device and browser characteristics and user preferences. These various data points are compared and cross-checked against the protocol-level data to verify consistency.
• User interaction: Analyzes user interactions to distinguish between human and bot traffic. It assesses how users interact with devices such as touch screens, keyboards, and mouse, identifying bots through their lack of interaction or abnormal usage patterns.
• User behavior: Monitors visitor behavior on your website to identify unusual patterns indicative of bots.
• Risk classification: Provides a deterministic and actionable low-, medium-, or high-risk classification of the traffic, based on the anomalies found during the evaluation.

"Content Protector is more than just a security tool; it's a business enabler," says Rupesh Chokshi, SVP and GM, Application Security at Akamai. "By safeguarding your digital assets from scraping threats, it prevents competitors from undercutting your offers, enhances site performance to keep customers engaged, and protects your brand from counterfeiters. Content Protector provides direct business value to grow your digital business with confidence."

Achieves SOC 2, Type II Compliance & TPN Blue Shield Certification

 LucidLink, pioneers in enabling instant access to data and real-time collaboration for the world's most creative companies, has completed its Systems and Organization Controls (SOC 2), Type II audit, and has completed the TPN Blue Shield certification by the Trusted Partner Network (TPN). These certifications recognize LucidLink's commitment to providing secure and reliable file transfer solutions for the media and entertainment (M&E) industry, helping creatives work collaboratively to create award-winning programs such as The Bear and Oscar-winning movies such as The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.

LucidLink Filespace technology, with its secure "Zero-Knowledge" encryption model, exceeds industry compliance standards. This ensures that neither LucidLink nor storage providers can access customer data, providing a safe operating environment for sensitive workloads across all M&E segments.

Developed by the American Institute of Chartered Public Accountants (AICPA), SOC 2 is a rigorous compliance framework designed to ensure the effectiveness of a company's security policies and procedures. LucidLink's SOC 2 audit was conducted by Prescient Assurance, a leading security and compliance attestation provider for B2B SaaS companies worldwide.

TPN is an industry-driven global security consortium that aims to standardize security requirements and assessments for the M&E supply chain. The TPN Blue Shield certification affirms that LucidLink has met the organization's stringent requirements to safeguard valuable media assets.

In an era where M&E companies increasingly rely on cloud-based technologies, LucidLink's SOC 2 and TPN certifications become crucial assets. Cloud technology facilitates streamlined workflows, remote collaboration, and improved content delivery to global audiences. As organizations migrate to the cloud, data security becomes paramount for sustaining operations and maintaining stakeholder trust. SOC 2, Type II, and TPN compliance are gold standards for proving a company's capability to safeguard confidential customer information.

Gregory Tomczyk, Vice President of IT at LucidLink, emphasizes the company's dedication to data security: "Data security is a fundamental tenant to LucidLink's mindset and operating model. We continually strive to protect our clients from current and emerging threats. We recognize that our customers' data is their most valuable asset and are committed to applying relevant industry standards across our products and services adhering to the highest international compliance standards. We can demonstrate this commitment by achieving SOC 2, Type II compliance, and TPN Blue Shield certification."

Also taps former Walmart executive Dory Butler to lead work across consumer channels

Verizon is investing more in customer experience with the creation of an organization dedicated solely to creating the best experiences for customers and employees. Under Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath, Brian Higgins has been appointed as the company’s first-ever Chief Customer Experience Officer for the consumer group. Former Walmart executive Dory Butler will join Higgins as senior vice president of Customer Experience, where she will lead the development and delivery of high-quality sales and service experiences focusing on the end-to-end consumer journey.

The Customer Experience Organization will invest heavily in transforming the way customers do business with Verizon, and how our employees serve them. Focus areas include AI and personalization, digital channel and systems functionality and delivering best-in-class experiences across all consumer touch points. The team will create a more simplified approach and help deliver customized experiences based on customers’ and employees’ unique needs.

“Everything starts with the customer, and we have a big opportunity to connect with them in a way we’ve never done before,” said Sampath, CEO, Verizon Consumer. “It begins and ends with the customer experience, which we are dedicated to improving, and the new Customer Experience organization is laser focused on just that. I have no doubt our customers will see meaningful benefits as a result.”

Higgins, a telecommunications veteran, previously served as senior vice president of Device Marketing and Consumer Product where he led all product and marketing for the Verizon Consumer Group. Prior, he held roles of increasing responsibility throughout Verizon including network implementation, product development and long-term technology planning.

Butler was recently tapped to join the team as senior vice president of Customer Experience. She comes to Verizon from Walmart, where she led Omni Customer Experience Product Management for the Walmart US Mobile App and Walmart.com. Prior, Butler spent 20 years at American Express where she led AmericanExpress.com globally in over 25 markets, overseeing product management, marketing and operations for the global web experiences.

Higgins’ team is also led by Lance Koenders, vice president of Experience Products and Chris Paul, vice president, Digital, Sales and Experience. Koenders, who previously led mobile product management at Verizon, will focus on developing new customer-focused products that are unique to Verizon and built solely to improve the customer experience. Paul, who has held digital marketing roles across Verizon, has responsibility for Digital Channels and Consumer Experience, including all digital sales and consumer-facing channels, with a focus on improving the customer’s digital experience.

Verizon Communications Inc. was formed on June 30, 2000 and is one of the world’s leading providers of technology and communications services. Headquartered in New York City and with a presence around the world, Verizon generated revenues of $134.0 billion in 2023. The company offers data, video and voice services and solutions on its award-winning networks and platforms, delivering on customers’ demand for mobility, reliable network connectivity, security and control.