Optimizes operations and improves efficiencies with tailored open-source component fixes

Persistent Systems (BSE: PERSISTENT) and (NSE: PERSISTENT), a global Digital Engineering and Enterprise Modernization leader, today launched a unique open-source maintenance service to facilitate keeping an organization's open-source software up to date with all patches, bug fixes, and incorporating the latest software releases. The service is comprised of a dedicated team of experts and specialists dealing with a wide range of complex software, equipped with the latest technologies, and backed by a knowledge base to help clients maintain their open-source software with all releases for the continuity of business operations.

More than 90% of an application's software is constructed using open-source components. While open-source software offers numerous advantages, it also presents particular challenges in an enterprise environment. Organizations face delays in software upgrades and maintenance while waiting for the open-source community to provide fixes, which in turn means potentially missing software delivery and security compliance obligations. Persistent's open-source maintenance service aims to address this challenge with a dedicated team focused on component upgrades while maintaining security and integrity. It accelerates an enterprise's ability to optimize operations and improves efficiency with fast, high-quality, compatible, and secure fixes in hours instead of days by leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Large Language Models and Generative AI, among others.

Persistent provides a range of offerings under this service, from a complimentary project assessment to two premium subscriptions, all of which can be accessed here. The complimentary service provides valuable insights on the potential vulnerabilities in projects and areas of improvement, with recommendations to enhance software performance and security. 

To opt in to tailored open-source solutions, the Company offers two subscriptions. One provides timely alerts and support for available solutions with customized fixes if solutions are unavailable within the open-source community; the premium subscription is a comprehensive package that provides end-to-end automated deployment of solutions, streamlining the implementation process. Each fix is tested, SLSA-3 compliant, and compatible with the project.

Persistent has partnered with Lineaje Inc., a leading expert in software supply chain security management, to integrate its technology and advanced AI capabilities into Persistent's open-source service. Lineaje will enable the Company to help clients gain visibility into open-source components and provide impact assessment and prioritization of maintenance based on compatibility, integrity, and security in their supply chain.

This service ensures open-source updates are compatible with existing software components, provides VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) documents for potential vulnerabilities, and delivers pre-tested certified fixes for risks in a timely manner.

"Organizations across industries are significantly lagging in software upgrades, and many issues discovered in open-source code remain unresolved for an indeterminate amount of time. The engineering mindset of our expert team and our experience building and solving complex software and security issues allows Persistent to provide high quality, customized fixes to open-source components, so our clients can enhance their operational efficiency and meet governance standards in a much faster timeframe. Our unique offering aims to establish a standardized service for timely open-source maintenance and foster collaboration within the greater open-source community, contributing to its growth."   

"Open-source code makes up a substantial portion of the modern organization's software supply chain. Without formal tools to peel back what's in open-source dependencies, developers and security teams are in the dark about what's in their software. Given the prevalence of security and maintainability issues in the majority of open-source components, coupled with the fact that 64% of vulnerabilities lack available fixes, there's a critical need for managed and secure open-source components. We are excited that Lineaje open-source management technology has been selected for Persistent's open-source service to address this significant gap in software development organizations."

"In today's software landscape, open-source plays a pivotal role, serving as a foundational strategy for software developers. With over 82% of open-source components being high risk, ensuring the security and uninterrupted support of these resources is paramount to sustaining industry progress while upholding the highest standards of security and integrity. Persistent, leveraging its extensive history in product engineering spanning decades, combined with Lineaje's groundbreaking and distinctive technology, stands as the ideal bridge to address this critical need."

BLOCKSMITH&Co. (Head office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Tetsuya Sanada; hereinafter "BLOCKSMITH") is pleased to announce that Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of Tencent, one of the world's largest technology companies, has agreed to jointly promote efforts to expand the Web3 ecosystem, particularly in the development of services in the entertainment domain. By providing technical support such as SDK provision by Tencent Cloud and backing up BLOCKSMITH's ongoing development and operation of the vertical short video quiz app "QAQA", the two companies aim to make entertainment services using Web3 and blockchain technology more widespread among the general public.

Details

BLOCKSMITH will utilise Tencent Cloud's advanced technology to further improve the UX (user experience) of QAQA, a vertical short video quiz application.

First, the inclusion of Tencent Cloud's User Generated Short Video (UGSV) SDK makes it easier for users to create and share their own quiz videos.

The adoption of the Tencent Cloud Video on Demand (VOD) solution will also enhance content generation and delivery on the QAQA platform. User-generated short videos will be efficiently managed and distributed through the VOD system.

These technological advances in the QAQA platform form the basis for a new trend in web3 entertainment services. With this innovative initiative, BLOCKSMITH and Tencent Cloud aim to provide a platform where users can be entertained and rewarded at the same time.

Bectran, Inc., the industry leader in innovative, cutting-edge technology for credit, collections and accounts receivable management, is pleased to announce the appointment of Nerissa Naidu and Jay Readey to its Board of Directors. Bectran has made these strategic appointments to strengthen its board governance, with a focus on growth and technological innovation in forthcoming years.

Nerissa Naidu has served as a board member to multiple businesses globally over the last 6 years. Her directive is to advise on the overall ESG, technology enablement, and revenue generation strategies as businesses grow or gain strategic funding. She brings a breadth of financial services expertise, having filled numerous senior executive roles, to open, manage and grow global businesses. Additionally, Nerissa has extensively navigated cross-border working environments and regulators including the Fed. Most recently she has been appointed to the Advisory Board for the Export Import bank of the United States in 2022, a US federal agency operating within the executive branch of the President. Nerissa holds an MBA from the New York University, Stern School of Business, and a bachelor’s in industrial engineering from the Durban University of Technology.

“We’re excited to bring Nerissa on. Her diverse global experience, most recently at AIG and Accenture, will help expand our mission and propel Bectran to a new level of revenue growth,” said Bectran CEO Louis Ifeguni. “She brings a breadth of innovative expertise, including co-founding a fintech company, that is creating a smart wallet for small businesses.”

“Growing companies with a profile as esteemed as Bectran is always an exciting challenge. I am looking forward to amplifying innovation as a basis for its accelerated expansion, while supporting the board in developing robust corporate governance,” said Nerissa Naidu.

Jay Readey is a lawyer, consultant and social entrepreneur. Jay founded and serves as President and CEO of The MetroAlliance, a Chicago-based social venture focused on neighborhood transformation. Through a mix of for-profit strategies and nonprofit initiatives, The MetroAlliance focuses on strengthening dynamic metropolitan communities. Jay also practices law with Ginsberg Jacobs LLC, focused on complex community development finance, and teaches as an adjunct professor of housing and community development law at DePaul University School of Law. Jay is member of the inaugural 2015 class of Presidential Leadership Scholars through the Bush and Clinton Presidential Libraries and Foundations. Jay is a graduate of Yale College, received a JD from Yale Law School and earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management.

“Jay’s dedication to the diverse neighborhoods of Chicago demonstrates his belief in the power of community,” said Bectran CEO Louis Ifeguni. “We know his breadth of knowledge, fostered by his experience practicing complex community development finance, will bring about a renewed entrepreneurial spirit to Bectran.”

“I’m excited to bring my business-driven transformational strategies to the Bectran leadership, ensuring that we leverage all avenues to bolster our market position,” Jay comments.

Flashost, a trailblazing e-commerce platform, has officially announced the commencement of a major fundraising round with the ambitious goal of raising $74 million broken down into smaller annual transfers over a five-year timeline based on accomplished milestones agreed upon with investors throughout North America and Europe.

This initiative is aimed at fostering the growth of a global "Rapport Economy" - an innovative approach that places human-centric interactions at the heart of digital commerce.

"With our fundraising efforts, we're inviting investors to join us on a transformative journey," said Mike Norton, CEO of Flashost. "We are not just creating another online marketplace; we are shaping a community where each transaction goes beyond the exchange of goods to building meaningful relationships."

Norton has published an open letter to investors, which they can read here.

Flashost is seeking to partner with forward-thinking investors who understand the value of infusing technology with the personal touch that customers yearn for in the digital age. The company's commitment to blending sophisticated AI with genuine human interaction offers an unrivaled online shopping experience.

Investors who share Flashost's vision for a more connected and humane e-commerce landscape are encouraged to book a meeting with the team to learn more about the investment opportunities. The innovative scheduling page, designed for ease of access and efficiency, can be found at https://flashost.youcanbook.me

In addition to learning about the company's unique market position and cutting-edge technology, interested parties will also get an exclusive look at Flashost's web commercial, business plan, pitch deck, and demo the platform before a major public release. This engaging visual narrative encapsulates the company's mission and the impact of joining the Flashost investor community.

"We believe that e-commerce should be more than just buying and selling. It should be about creating a bond, an experience, and a lasting relationship," Mike Norton continued. "This fundraising round is a clarion call to all investors who are passionate about changing the e-commerce world for the better while generating thousands of jobs that most would have thought we'd lose in the rise of the AI era."

To witness the future of e-commerce and explore investment possibilities, visit Flashost's meeting scheduler and reserve your time slot for a pitch deck meeting. Take the first step towards becoming a part of a company that is redefining the essence of online transactions into heartfelt interactions.

Through Optimove Courses’ online, video-first learning paths, Optimove clients are empowered to develop, and grow their CRM marketing skills and expertise and maximize the return of marketing activities

Optimove, the first Customer-Led Marketing Platform, today launched Optimove Courses, an online curriculum of insight-packed video-first learning paths designed to empower Optimove clients to master and maximize the platform’s CRM marketing capabilities. Through Optimove Courses’ four initial learning paths, clients gain a deeper understanding of how to utilize the tools at their disposal to craft more sophisticated and impactful marketing campaigns. 

The Optimove Courses series is based on years of in-depth knowledge and insight into clients’ needs and requirements as they learn to master the Optimove platform. Each of the four learning paths consists of self-paced, bite-size video-first modules meticulously crafted to accommodate busy schedules and all career stages. 

Optimove Courses’ interactive learning experience progresses logically, catering to clients’ specific needs and objectives. Each module incorporates exercises and assessments to reinforce learning and ensure a firm grasp of key concepts. The initial learning paths on the platform are:

• Optimove Essentials: empowers clients to establish a strong foundation in key Optimove capabilities and fundamentals.  
• Optimove Advanced: designed to elevate skills with advanced strategies and techniques.  
• Optimove Email Marketing: empowers mastery of the subtleties of email marketing, a critical component of any marketing strategy.  
• Optimove Real-Time Marketing: designed to elevates and transform approaches to customer engagement.

In the coming weeks, new learning paths will be added on Data and Reporting, Mobile Marketing, Opti-X (Optimove’s Digital Experience Platform), and more. 

Upon completing a learning path, clients will have the opportunity to earn an official Optimove certification. The certification demonstrates marketers’ dedication to mastering Optimove and is a valuable credential for career advancement.  

"This initiative was born out of thousands of hours spent engaging one-on-one with our clients to ensure they optimize Optimove’s platform and solutions. Optimove Courses are a valuable resource designed to enhance the proficiency of our clients and partners in relationship marketing," stated Varda Tirosh, Chief Customer Officer at Optimove. "Optimove Courses empowers them to expand their knowledge and expertise at their own pace to harness the full potential of advanced Customer-Led Marketing capabilities. We are dedicated to our clients' success in offering this learning opportunity that goes beyond the platform to fuel their journey towards elevated customer loyalty, trust, and brand growth." 

AI-enhanced transformation takes optimized image quality to the next level, while support for the powerful JPEG XL standard is now available for iOS 17, macOS Sonoma and Safari

Cloudinary, the image and video platform that powers many of the world's top brands, today launched a new AI-enhanced image quality feature and expanded JPEG XL support. These two new features enable developers to build and deliver high-quality and high-performing visual experiences.

Cloudinary’s automatic quality selection capability (q_auto) is one of the company’s most popular product features, used by tens of thousands of users worldwide. It analyzes the pixels of an image to find the most suitable quality level and encoding settings based on user device and bandwidth. The AI-enhanced q_auto update announced today takes this process to a whole new level beyond Cloudinary’s previous industry leading version.

Training AI for even smarter image compression

The evolution of q_auto has been fueled by Cloudinary’s extensive research into the impact of compression on perceived image quality. A key output of this is the Cloudinary Image Dataset (CID22) of human-annotated compressed images. Critical to building this dataset, humans annotated their perception of quality in relation to different compression scenarios. For the enhanced q_auto transformation, an AI model was trained on these observations. Through this Cloudinary found that the average image size could be reduced even further than previously calculated without any visible impact on quality, further minimizing bandwidth.

Apple’s support for JPEG XL helps fuel adoption

Cloudinary’s lead image researcher, Dr. Jon Sneyers, along with several researchers at Google, helped create JPEG XL, which delivers high-quality images on the modern web, offering high-fidelity compression and progressive rendering. Following Apple’s announcement last June that it would support JPEG XL in iOS 17, macOS Sonoma and the Safari browser, Cloudinary’s customers can now deliver unparalleled experiences to their users on Apple devices.

The benefits of JPEG XL include:

• Significant reduction in file size while maintaining high quality, providing a critical balance between performance and quality;
• Faster encoding/decoding (compared to AVIF) for increased performance;
• Progressive decoding to satisfy impatient web and mobile application visitors while providing a smoother experience;
• Designed for high-fidelity photographic use;
• Flexible lossless or lossy compression modes; and
• Existing JPEG images can be converted to JPEG XL with no generation loss – no other new image format can do this. JPEG XL files are 20% smaller and can be converted back to the exact same JPEG file.

“We’re always committed to applying the latest technologies and formats that empower our users to deliver superior visual content that helps them meet their business goals,” said Shelby Britton, senior director of Product Marketing at Cloudinary. “The enhancements we're introducing today exemplify this commitment: an AI-driven quality selection that further boosts image quality consistency and performance, along with the seamless integration of JPEG XL for Apple users. Together these set a higher bar for image optimization, driving higher resource efficiency, performance, and visual appeal."

Advertisers Can Now Leverage Purchase-Level Retail Data to Drive CTV Campaigns on a Cost-Per-Outcome Basis

tvScientific, the preeminent performance advertising platform for connected TV (CTV), today announced the launch of Retail Performance TV, a retail media solution that enables advertisers to leverage granular retail data including foot traffic, purchase history and location-specific interests to target CTV ad campaigns on a cost-per-outcome basis.

By blending synthetic retail data from a variety of sources in tvScientific’s CTV targeting and measurement platform, retailers can target television advertisements to specific households according to their search and purchase history while factoring in retail store visits, unlocking unheard-of levels of performance.

“Retail Performance TV leverages the most powerful retail-level data - purchase history and geography - to serve ads on the most powerful channel available: television,” said Jason Fairchild, CEO of tvScientific. “The ability to activate this kind of rich data on a one-to-one basis on the biggest, brightest screen in the household represents an entirely new capability for advertisers.”

The launch of Retail Performance TV follows the ongoing transition of the $72 billion TV advertising market to programmatic execution, as technologies emerge that enable the buying and measurement of TV advertising in a manner similar to the $200 billion search and social media market.

The past year of growth for tvScientific has included new partnerships with MMPs AppsFlyer, Adjust, Kochava and Singular; expanded leadership with Matthew Koontz as Head of Product and Michael Bilow as Head of Data Science; and a partnership with MetricWorks, the leading provider of media mix modeling-based incrementality measurement.

“Structural change in the TV ad market continues to accelerate, and the advertisers that want to drive and measure performance need to be leveraging and learning the growing sophistication of CTV,” Fairchild said. “More brands are launching on CTV every day, and anybody who doesn’t want to be left behind should be incorporating CTV into their campaigns.”

Local and national ad buyers can now better optimize TV spend for audience reach and efficiency.

Ampersand, the audience-first TV advertising sales company, today announced the release of its next-generation local and national TV insights, empowering ad buyers to rebalance their TV investments for optimal reach and frequency. Fueled by aggregated data insights from 65 million households, and with a commitment to protecting personal information, these insights will revolutionize the way agencies and their advertisers understand and leverage the combined reach and efficiencies of their local cable, broadcast, and national linear TV ad buys. 

With the ever-evolving media landscape, advertisers face the challenge of reaching their target audiences effectively and efficiently. What sets Ampersand's latest TV insights apart from others in the industry is the unparalleled scale of data insights it offers, coupled with the remarkable speed at which Ampersand delivers reports– in hours instead of weeks. Ampersand's insights empower brands to make data-driven decisions by offering comprehensive visibility into campaign performance across various channels. Brands can then immediately activate on their findings with Ampersand's industry-leading inventory, including over 75% of the US addressable HH footprint.

Ampersand's data insights reveal significant over-exposure of heavy TV viewers in target audiences in both national linear and local broadcast campaigns, prompting the need for a more effective approach to reach more unique households within the client's target. In national linear campaigns, the strong reach initially achieved quickly plateaus within a matter of weeks, leading to wasteful impressions and exceeding desired frequencies.

Similarly, while local broadcast campaigns gain strong initial reach, over-exposure remains a common issue as certain households see campaigns up to 10 times more frequently than intended. In addition, Ampersand uncovered that a substantial portion of local broadcast impressions reach audiences that fall outside the planned target audience.

By enabling measurement against strategic first or third-party audience segments, Ampersand gives brands the ability to pull back from waste and disjointed frequency to activate significantly more efficient and holistic national and local campaigns with unprecedented accuracy, resulting in an improved return on investment overall, and up to 20% more reach.

"Our next-generation TV insights mark a significant milestone for the advertising industry as a whole and align with Ampersand's core value of always simplifying for our clients," said Andrew Matero, Ampersand's VP of platform sales. "In economic times like we face today, every dollar needs to work as hard as possible. With these powerful insights, agencies and advertisers can confidently maximize the impact of their TV investments. By leveraging advanced technology and industry expertise, Ampersand aims to reshape the future of TV advertising and empower brands with unparalleled capabilities to reach their desired audiences."

"Ampersand's advanced technology and robust data infrastructure enable us to provide advertisers with actionable insights at an unprecedented speed, turning what would traditionally take weeks to months into a matter of hours or minutes," said Steven Pearson, Ampersand SVP, Data Science and Data Engineering. "This accelerated timeline empowers brands to make agile and data-driven decisions, maximizing the impact of their TV campaigns and staying ahead of the competition."

Brands and agencies are eligible to receive these insights on local or national TV campaigns that have run as early as two weeks from the time the report is pulled.