The acquisition will strengthen key products, enhance the AppsFlyer for games offering, and advances private data collaboration within AppsFlyer’s Privacy Cloud Marketplace

AppsFlyer, the global leader in marketing measurement, attribution, and data analytics, today announced its acquisition of devtodev, a full-cycle data analytics solution for game and app developers. This strategic acquisition bolsters AppsFlyer's core offerings and marks a significant step in the development of the new AppsFlyer Privacy Cloud Marketplace. It also expands AppsFlyer's capabilities to meet the evolving needs of modern gaming and digital businesses, and serves as a natural extension of the AppsFlyer for games suite of products and resources for gaming companies.

Founded in 2014, devtodev helps developers analyze their games and apps, and delivers data-driven insights for optimizing user retention, maximizing conversions, and creating personalized experiences. The synergy between AppsFlyer and devtodev technologies unifies the entire customer data set into one robust measurement and data analytics platform, creating an array of powerful tools, insights, and experiences to enhance the user lifecycle and accelerate business growth.

"Devtodev's technology, team, and expertise are a perfect match for AppsFlyer, creating a synergy that fuels not just business growth, but a visionary approach to the future,” said Oren Kaniel, CEO and Co-founder of AppsFlyer. “This collaboration fosters a spirit of unity among marketing, product, and monetization teams, empowering them with a fully integrated data ecosystem.”

Accelerated digital transformation has made the role of marketers more complex and highlighted the importance of product-led growth in the gaming and apps sectors. With marketers focusing more on retention and customer lifetime value (LTV), the demand for advanced data analytics has surged. Coupled with an increased focus on privacy measures and a recent increase in signal loss, data silos and inconsistencies have complicated the marketing decision-making process. This acquisition will enable gaming and app developers to harness unparalleled, unified data analytics and actionable insights, unlocking powerful opportunities for efficient growth.

“Our vision at devtodev has always been to empower gaming and app developers to make the best data-driven decisions,” said Dmitry Kravtsov, Founder and CEO of devtodev. “By joining forces with AppsFlyer, we will provide developers the ability to leverage integrated data, AI, and insights to create powerful, captivating experiences that drive efficient business growth.”

Devtodev will be one of the pioneering analytics solutions that integrates into AppsFlyer's Privacy Cloud Marketplace. AppsFlyer's Data Clean Room will serve as an open and interoperable platform, and devtodev’s integration underscores AppsFlyer’s commitment to a future where businesses can seamlessly integrate third-party services and AI models from various providers, while ensuring data privacy and operational efficiency.

Kaniel added, “Over the past two decades, cloud computing and SaaS have compelled companies to share their customers' data with various entities. Now, with the emergence of AI services, and its appetite for vast amounts of data, we propose a paradigm shift: bringing these services or AI models to the data, instead of sending the data to the service. This boosts compliance, accelerates time-to-market, and eliminates the need for user data movement, copying, or sharing, ensuring utmost privacy and efficiency. Together with devtodev, we're immensely proud to build the next generation of growth analytics and deliver privacy-first measurement products.”

Search UI Kit extends the capabilities of SearchStax's  award-winning site search solution, enabling flexible and easy delivery of powerful search-optimized digital experiences

SearchStax, a leading cloud-native search platform enabling web teams to deliver powerful search in an easy, fast, and cost-effective way, today announced the launch of Search UI Kit for SearchStax Studio, an optimized set of software and tools that empower developers to easily build and customize search experiences within headless content management system (CMS) and composable digital experience platform (DXP) architectures.

For years, the SearchStax Studio product has enabled organizations across the globe to painlessly transform their digital experiences to be search-optimized. Through innovative packaging, workflow designs, extensive APIs, and native connector integrations, SearchStax Studio has enabled digital teams to embed site search functionality to their websites in record time, at a price point that fits the budget of non-commerce search use cases, while improving operational efficiency – with SearchStax Studio, digital marketing teams can directly control and update the search experience in real time, thereby freeing up developers. This combination of flexibility, powerful search capabilities, ease of use, and speed of implementation for search-optimized digital experiences are unmatched in the search market today.

Search UI Kit adds to SearchStax Studio's flexibility, ease of use, and speed of implementation, by directly addressing the technical requirement within headless architectures, to decouple front-end search capabilities from back-end systems and logic, within common enterprise CMS and DXP environments such as Acquia/Drupal, Sitecore, Adobe, Contentful, and others.

Although SearchStax Studio's extensive APIs have already enabled current customers to deploy within headless architectures for some time, the Search UI Kit further bolsters the ability for SearchStax Studio developers to painlessly implement site search even faster, within a broader range of headless environments.

The Search UI Kit for SearchStax Studio consists of:

• Search UI Components – pre-built front-end search results page components for JavaScript-powered front ends – including component libraries for React, Vue, and Angular
• Search UI App – a pre-built search result page app for immediate use on any website
• Search UI REST APIs – one of several sets of REST APIs supported within SearchStax Studio, used for displaying search results and responding to user interactions
• Tools and templates – fast-track documentation and components needed to get started quickly, including demo apps available on GitHub

"Many development teams today are moving quickly toward headless in order to increase agility and flexibility," said Pete Navarra, VP of DXP Solutions at SearchStax and Sitecore MVP. "And just as quickly, many of these same organizations are looking to retool their digital experiences to be more search-optimized. The need for search stems from the fact that a high-quality search experience has proven to increase brand perception and loyalty. The need to do headless and search-optimized experiences should not slow dev teams down, nor hinder their ability to optimize the experience. Our market-leading approach to powerful and easy search extends to headless, enabling development teams to deliver quicker and maintain complete flexibility as their architectural and operational needs evolve."

In conjunction with the SearchStax Ingest APIs and SearchStax Crawler – used for indexing and updating content – as well as analytics tracking and metrics reporting APIs, the Search UI Kit for SearchStax Studio enables development teams that are seriously considering adding site search within a headless CMS architecture to execute on a more agile, painless site search implementation strategy than other solutions can offer.

Microsoft Azure customers worldwide gain access to the Velotix data security platform to govern and control compliant access to data throughout the data access lifecycle

Velotix, a leading data security company announced today that Velotix AI-powered data access and policy management is available in the Microsoft Azure marketplace. The Velotix data security platform governs and controls compliant access to data throughout the data access lifecycle to provide maximum data utilization with minimum risk.

By using Velotix, Microsoft Azure customers can more easily and securely access data while benefiting from scalable, reliable, and serverless analytics. Data teams can centralize data access and security policies using automated enforcement across Azure Synapse, Azure Databricks, Azure SQL Databases, PowerBI, and more -- through modern, fine-grained, attribute-based access controls (ABAC).

Automatically tagging and discovering data, Velotix creates a single repository for accessing information and granting and revoking permissions.  Users are able to enter data access requests and manage a self-service portal to track compliance and monitor the health of organizational data access.  Leveraging the power of AI, Velotix continuously learns and documents organizational policies and external regulations to keep companies compliant.   

"The risk of regulatory violations, fines and a tarnished brand is preventing data access that is needed for business agility and optimization," said Dr. Adi Hod, CEO and Co-Founder at Velotix. "Velotix brings Microsoft Azure customers faster and safer access to valuable data to enable market leaders to keep increasing their competitive edge." 

"Microsoft Azure Marketplace lets customers worldwide discover, try and deploy software solutions that are certified and optimized to run on Azure," said Jake Zborowski, General Manager, Microsoft Azure Platform at Microsoft Corp. "Azure Marketplace helps solutions like Velotix reach more customers and markets."

MobileFuse, one of the largest in-app, CTV, and DOOH advertising platforms, today unveiled Braid, its proprietary machine learning platform. The platform will initially focus on optimizing traffic shaping, providing increases to programmatic efficiency and a reduction of unnecessary bloat.

The platform offers unique benefits to both publishers and advertisers alike. For advertisers and demand side partners, Braid learns the specific criteria each bidder requires or focuses on. From there, it delivers exactly what bidders need to meet campaign goals. This creates new operational efficiencies and cuts down on unnecessary data and processing as advertisers only receive opportunities that match their needs. Most traffic shaping solutions take an aggregate look at what ad buyers are interested in, and then sell inventory that aligns to that analysis. Braid is unique in that it looks at each individual buyer, and decides what to send to that platform specifically. This solution demonstrates MobileFuse's commitment to providing innovative tools for brands and advertisers at scale, especially as they look to optimize results.

"Now is the time to implement machine learning in this capacity – especially with rapid changes happening around privacy, cookies and device IDs. As each new regulatory change influences which devices and creatives bring the largest impact, the Braid platform ensures we can match each buyer's needs with the best match," said Ken Harlan, Founder and CEO of MobileFuse. "Additionally, these new capabilities further reduce our carbon emissions. As our solutions provide more curated opportunities to bidders, that reduces unnecessary server pings across the board and ultimately drops our carbon emissions even further."

MobileFuse's proprietary machine learning platform represents a defining moment for its tech stack. It is built in a way that enables the company to quickly add new capabilities and features, and uncover data-driven insights that lead to constant optimizations. Altogether, this ensures more effective campaigns for the company's advertiser clients, and better revenue for publishers.

Braid is now fully integrated across MobileFuse's platform.

Custom research reveals 3 in 5 FAST buyers use FAST’s niche programming to target specific audiences.

Analysis also finds that 94% of FAST impressions are delivered on the TV screen.

Xumo and Comcast Advertising released a joint report, titled The 2023 State of FAST. This new report explores the growing usage of free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) among advertisers and consumers, and the role it is playing in multiscreen TV advertising plans today.

The report combines data insights from across Comcast Advertising and Xumo Play alongside custom research with advertisers and agency executives undertaken by Gavin Bridge, VP, Media Research at CRG Global and known in the industry as “FASTMaster.” The result is an in-depth and quantitative look at the current state of FAST in the U.S.

According to the report, advertisers are increasingly including FAST in their strategies in response to viewer habits: After devoting more ad spend to the channel in 2023 compared to 2022, 84% of buyers think they will increase their FAST investments even more in 2024. Consumer interest and awareness continues to grow around the medium, which offers an engaging, TV-like experience at no cost—in fact, the study reveals, 94% of FAST impressions are delivered on the TV screen.

“Every month, FAST channels are attracting tens of millions of viewers due to the plethora of high-quality programming including content like local news, niche sports, themed movies, enthusiast TV shows, and more,” said Marcien Jenckes, President, Xumo and Managing Director, Comcast Advertising. “The results of this research highlight how the advertising industry is responding to FAST, and their increasing interest in its monetization potential.”

Nearly half of advertisers surveyed said they are currently using FAST in their media buying and planning. They cited that a large factor in including FAST is the value it provides in helping them reach their audiences incrementally and more accurately; in fact, three in five FAST buyers use it to target a specific audience, and over half of advertisers use FAST because it extends the reach of their audience.

The report concludes with several predictions around the future of FAST, including the blurring between FAST and linear, the personalization of the user experience, and increased advertiser education as FAST continues to mature.

“I expect demand for FAST to grow in the coming years as pricing pressure on consumers from subscription streaming services mounts,” said Megan Halscheid, VP, PMX Marketplace Intelligence, Publicis Media. “More and more of the viewing audience will look to FAST to add to their viewing experience, making the format increasingly valuable to ad buyers.”

The 2023 State of FAST is the first joint report from Xumo, a joint venture between Comcast and Charter, and Comcast Advertising, the advertising division of Comcast Cable.

Companies Form Commercial Partnership to bundle Amagi's Leading FAST Platform with Cineverse's Matchpoint Suite & content services

Cineverse Corp., a global streaming technology and entertainment company with one of the world's largest portfolios of streaming channels and content libraries, and Amagi – the global leader in cloud-based SaaS technology for broadcast and connected TV – have teamed up to jointly offer an end-to-end FAST kit for Video Service Providers (VSP) encompassing monetization services, content acquisition and curation services, and a technology backend powered by Amagi's award-winning SaaS solutions for FAST and Cineverse's Matchpoint offerings. The joint FAST solution for VSPs will be offered as a managed service available starting January 2024.

This strategic partnership expands the two companies' long-standing existing relationship since 2018.  The new combined offering brings the most comprehensive, end-to-end FAST and AVOD services to the marketplace, which solves many of the challenges that VSPs such as FAST Platforms, TV OEMs, SVOD app and Telcos/cable companies, face as they plan to launch and/or scale their FAST streaming business.

The FAST kit will enable VSPs to launch FAST with minimum effort and provides everything needed to get into FAST. This includes comprehensive FAST content offerings for all major markets.

Both companies will team up on sales and marketing of the services, allowing each to bring additional capabilities as they become available along with their collective FAST marketing expertise to new and existing customers. 

"Partnering with Amagi presents a unique opportunity for both companies to create unparalleled value in the evolving FAST landscape," said Tony Huidor, Chief Technology Officer of Cineverse. "We're setting new standards in service excellence, allowing our clients to benefit from our combined expertise. This isn't just about technology; it's about enabling meaningful viewer experiences."

"We are thrilled to partner with Cineverse to bring this end-to-end FAST solution to market. Cineverse's expertise in content acquisition, editorial and their VOD suite of products is a perfect complement to our own, and together we are able to offer an unmatched solution that truly addresses the needs of FAST operators/platforms," said Srinivasan KA, Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Amagi. "The joint FAST Kit offering is the ideal solution for anybody looking to launch and scale a FAST service and generate new revenue streams without introducing new costs and resources. We are confident that this offering will revolutionize the way FAST services are launched and operated, and we are excited to partner with Cineverse to make it happen."

FreeWheel, a global technology platform for the television advertising industry, today announced the launch of Audience Manager, a new solution integrated into the company’s TV Platform that enables publishers to unlock faster audience activation across screens.

Available now to the company’s publisher clients in the U.S., Audience Manager enables execution at scale by simplifying audience creation and targeting across screens, enhancing FreeWheel’s audience capabilities. Identity resolution within Audience Manager is powered by the FreeWheel Identity Network. The latter is the latest solution to stem from FreeWheel’s identity initiative, an effort to enhance ID interoperability and advance new capabilities for the premium TV ad ecosystem.

With these new capabilities, publishers can seamlessly tap into and activate data within FreeWheel’s TV Platform using third-party segments available through new partner integrations. The benefit is quick, easy access to audience data without the need for lengthy commercial negotiations and operational set-ups.

The new solution is built for speed, allowing publishers to activate audiences quicker by integrating, building, and forecasting audiences 66% faster than previous solutions, activating in under 24 hours. Real-time audience sizing provides visibility into the number of households and individuals, helping publishers respond to RFPs faster with scaled and curated audiences and to manage reach more effectively for advertisers.

Audience Manager has been adopted by 13 publishers to date – with more onboarding each month – and so far, audience matching has improved 3-4x compared to FreeWheel’s previous offering.

The solution comes at a timely point: As the TV ad landscape continues to fragment, advertisers and publishers have difficulty matching audiences and scaling campaigns on premium inventory across screens. By empowering publishers to build, manage and activate audiences using first-, second-, and third-party audience segments – all underpinned by the FreeWheel Identity Network – this new, built-for-TV solution enables quick audience activation at scale across screens and supply pools.

“Marketers increasingly want to reach more precise and addressable audiences on premium content. This, paired with the deprecation of cookies and third-party identifiers, means we need to build for the TV ad ecosystem of the future while innovating for the industry’s needs today,” said David Dworin, Chief Product Officer, FreeWheel. “The digitization of TV promises improved measurement and targeting capabilities, but there is still a need for real-time insights and interoperability. Audience Manager, powered by our FreeWheel Identity Network, helps solve for these challenges by bringing much needed advanced activation capabilities to our premium TV marketers and publishers.”

“Since adopting FreeWheel’s Audience Manager, we’ve been able to target our inventory with improved ingestion and activation speed,” said Seth Wernick, SVP, Revenue Operations, Crackle. “FreeWheel has made a significant impact on our audience-based campaigns as we look to reach consumers across today’s fragmented TV ad ecosystem.”

The introduction of Audience Manager builds towards FreeWheel’s vision for the premium TV ad ecosystem, which is to make TV work across the entire marketing funnel. As the company continues to expand addressable supply by growing participation in the FreeWheel Identity Network, adopting Audience Manager is the first step towards delivering consistent, cross-screen audience activations in a privacy-first manner. As part of that initiative, FreeWheel launched a new identity report this week to help buy- and sell-side customers navigate this increasingly complex topic.

SproutLoud, the leader in distributed marketing, is proud to announce the launch of new AI capabilities that are being infused into the platform, featuring generative AI, improved user experience and enhanced productivity. With its long-term investment on integrating generative AI, advanced learning models, and self-training data science into its platform, SproutLoud is poised to redefine the brand-to-local landscape.

“SproutLoud’s primary focus is making marketing easier and more effective for brand-to-local teams that sell through channel partners, locations and frontline employees,” said Jared Shusterman, Founder and CEO of SproutLoud. “Our platform, infused with AI, will supercharge the capabilities our clients rely on to expedite speed to market, enforce brand compliance and regulatory compliance, and amplify ROI on content and marketing investments.”

Generative AI capabilities in SproutLoud will translate into tangible ease, reduced training cycles and increased productivity for brand-to-local co-marketing efforts. And the future use of AI for natural language search, spanning multiple languages, aims to simplify content distribution and make it even easier and more intuitive to find branded assets for marketing campaigns, promotions and social posts. The platform’s enhanced functionality will better equip local users with the right content at the right time, to ensure on-brand and on-message consistency.

SproutLoud is mindful of the process of incorporating data into baseline AI technologies and remains committed to providing enterprise clients and their partner networks with data privacy and security, ensuring the governance of AI, and protecting client data. SproutLoud is SOC 2 Type II, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA compliant, and continuously evaluates and invests in technologies that align with its commitment to security and privacy.

SproutLoud is dedicated to staying at the forefront of AI advancements, adhering to ethical considerations, prioritizing the elimination of bias, and ensuring transparency in AI usage.