Microsoft Azure customers are now Incentivized globally for adoption of best-in-class Data Lineage as Octopai gains Preferred Solution status on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Octopai, a global pioneering force in metadata management and enterprise-grade data lineage solutions, is pleased to announce its recent achievement of Microsoft's Co-Sell Incentivized status. This latest advancement solidifies an already robust alliance, now encompassing a collaborative selling approach. Microsoft's global sales force is newly motivated to champion Octopai's advanced metadata management solutions.

Upon achieving this Co-Sell Incentivized status, Octopai emerges as a preferred solution in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace for metadata management. For Microsoft Azure customers, this comes with distinct advantages: purchasing Octopai directly from the Azure Marketplace means Microsoft will contribute 100% of qualifying offer purchases toward your organization's Azure consumption commitment for each invoice period, inclusive of software and IP costs. For both Octopai and its customers, this streamlined approach significantly reduces the lengthy and tedious procurement process. Additionally, Microsoft's global sales force is now incentivized to actively promote Octopai's advanced metadata management solutions, providing even more momentum for businesses to take advantage of this robust collaboration.

“We are immensely proud to reach this milestone, a testament to the synergistic alignment between Octopai’s best-in-class metadata management solutions and Microsoft's robust Azure platform. Earning the Co-Sell Ready and MACC statuses is not just an achievement for us, but a gateway for our clients to experience enhanced efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and innovation,” said Zinette Ezra, Vice President of Product at Octopai.

“For Microsoft customers undergoing a cloud transformation, Octopai’s data lineage emerges as a critical component ensuring business continuity, offering a seamless, insightful, and secure transition. As we step into this enriched partnership, our focus remains steadfast on empowering businesses with unparalleled insights and analytics, driving data-driven decision-making to unprecedented heights.”

In a dynamic data landscape, what distinguishes Octopai's metadata management solution is its cutting-edge automation and mapping for data lineage, advanced insights, and seamless interoperability with cloud, on-prem, and hybrid systems.

Octopai's platform offers data map layers with intuitive visualization, aiding businesses in tracing their data lineage with precision. It is designed to be a comprehensive solution, streamlining data hygiene, assisting migrations, and ensuring data quality. This collaboration with Microsoft further amplifies its capabilities, granting users a more cohesive and integrated data management experience with Microsoft's suite of cloud, data warehouse, data movement and BI products.

By directly integrating with Microsoft's suite of data solutions like Power BI, SQL Synapse DB, Azure SQL DWH, Azure Data Factory, SSAS, SSRS, SQLS, MySQL, and SSIS, Octopai allows for the widest breadth of end-to-end data lineage.

These integrations allow enterprises to trust their data at every step, enabling data teams to dive deep into their data's journey and make decisions with newfound clarity and saving significant hours. These time savings are particularly impactful in areas like ad-hoc analysis, impact analysis, training, vendor data management, and production troubleshooting. These time savings are particularly impactful in areas like ad-hoc analysis, impact analysis, training, vendor data management, and production troubleshooting.

In line with strategic initiatives like Self-Service, Preserving Tribal Knowledge, Data Literacy and Democratization, Cloud Transformations, Migrations, and Data Landscape Technical Debt Reduction plans, Octopai offers more than immediate efficiency gains. Its deep, real-time insights into data flows can significantly accelerate and de-risk these strategic projects, making it a long-term investment in operational efficiency and risk management.

With Octopai's collaboration, users can harness the comprehensive features of Microsoft's data suite, achieving optimized data-driven operation, and for Microsoft Customers going through a Cloud Transformation Octopai'd data lineage is a critical component to ensure business continuity.

AI Companion will expand support for 32 new languages, new capabilities for Zoom Events, in-meeting questions, and meeting coaching

Today Zoom Video Communications, Inc. announced that Zoom AI Companion, the company’s generative AI assistant, has reached a milestone less than two months after its launch, with more than 125,000 accounts using AI Companion, generating more than one million meeting summaries. Zoom also announced new capabilities, additional language support, and further enhancements to existing capabilities for AI Companion.

“Providing the best value to our customers across our platform is core to our mission, which is why we made AI Companion available at no additional cost,¹ and we continue to introduce new AI capabilities at Zoom speed, so more of our customers can get the most out of Zoom’s AI innovations,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. “Our unique federated approach allows us to dynamically utilize different models, helping to reduce AI overhead costs and provide broad access to generative AI.”

New Zoom AI Companion capabilities
Beginning today, AI Companion users will be able to use the in-meeting questions capability in new languages, as well as receive short meeting summary overviews at the beginning of full meeting summaries.

• Users can now use AI Companion’s in-meeting questions capability in seven new languages (preview).
  
  
• Based on feedback from users, the meeting summaries capability now includes an overview at the top of the summary in emailed summaries, providing users with a shorter version of the meeting summary in addition to the full meeting summary. Meeting summary overviews will be available in summaries delivered via continuous meeting chat in November.

AI Companion capabilities available in November

Zoom will continue to improve AI Companion, with the following new capabilities planned to be available in November:

• Both AI Companion meeting summary and in-meeting questions capabilities will support a total of 32 new languages, in preview.
  
  
• AI Companion will provide users with meeting coach capabilities, beginning with speech analytics in Smart Recordings. Speech analytics will include the meeting host’s talk-listen ratio, talk speed, and speech fillers so that hosts can glean valuable insights into how they engage with meeting participants during Zoom Meetings.
  
  
• AI Companion will be available in Zoom Events, with chat compose capabilities for lobby chats and assistance with composing emails for registration, marketing, and ticketing communications.
  
  
• Zoom will introduce an optional control for customers to specify that AI Companion capabilities for their organization only use the Zoom large language model.

What Zoom customers are saying about AI Companion

“AI Companion’s meeting summaries and smart recordings are the first technological innovations in the last decade that bring us tangible time-saving, efficient benefits. People can prioritize specific meetings and collaborations while remaining confident they aren’t missing out on competing activities.” - Chris Blackstone, director, Digital Workplace and End User Computing, Convera

“Zoom’s AI Companion meeting summary tool is helping us become better communicators. Guided by its impressively accurate output, our teams are more consistently adhering to best practices in meetings such as stating the objective upfront and clearly outlining and assigning action items. Plus, we were able to save money by offboarding a vendor and save time by not having to produce meeting notes ourselves.” - Lucas Oliveira, COO, Bizzycar, Inc.

“Meeting summaries has saved our team a ton of time. We feel that everyone is in the loop without necessarily having to attend every meeting, which results in better collaboration.” - Karl Morsgofian, CIO, Gainsight

“Zoom's AI Companion exemplifies our vision for enhanced collaboration and innovation. With automated, detailed meeting summaries, it streamlines information sharing and boosts productivity. This inclusion in our Zoom plan not only improves efficiency but also yields significant cost savings, reflecting our commitment to a smarter, more connected future.” - John Georgatos, CIO, Mike Morse Law Firm

New product provides automated tagging and classification with actionable metadata for secure data management at scale

Immuta, a data security leader, today announced the release of Immuta Discover, a new product for automated tagging and classification on cloud data platforms. Immuta Discover enables data teams to establish and maintain highly accurate metadata for the primary purpose of data access control, monitoring and regulatory compliance.

Immuta Discover automatically and continuously discovers structured data in cloud data platforms. It can also leverage existing metadata pulled from enterprise data catalogs like Alation. Leveraging all of this metadata, Immuta Discover provides visibility of all sensitive data, which is critical for building data policies to protect the data and analyzing its usage. As a core pillar of Immuta's comprehensive Data Security Platform, Immuta Discover eliminates manual, error-prone processes and helps organizations improve data security, gain full visibility into their data and unlock its value.

Discovering, tagging and classifying sensitive data with highly accurate and descriptive metadata is a critical component of a successful data security strategy. However, today's organizations are burdened with increasingly dispersed data as the number of data sources and users continues to grow. Existing solutions are not designed to tag and classify data across all of these sources with the accuracy and granularity required for security and governance. The lack of accurate metadata creates security gaps and blind spots, making it difficult to meet stringent compliance regulations.

Immuta Discover allows data teams to easily and accurately scan, classify and tag data so they can apply data control policies and monitor data access. This allows teams to gain full visibility and context into all of their data assets, and better protect and monitor their sensitive data for enhanced data security posture management. Immuta offers 60+ pre-built and domain-specific classifiers, providing organizations with the flexibility to tailor data classifications to their unique business needs and based on their desired confidence levels.

"Immuta Discover is the foundational component to making any data security program work within your organization and to remain compliant," said Mo Plassnig, Chief Product Officer at Immuta. "It's the first step that must happen in order to protect your data. Data is constantly changing in today's digital age. Organizations must fully understand what data they have – with accurate classification – and maintain a trustworthy inventory of sensitive data across cloud platforms in order to meet growing data security and access demands. And Immuta Discover helps our customers accomplish just this."

With Immuta Discover, customers can automatically identify and classify sensitive data by leveraging the following new capabilities:

• Accurate and actionable metadata for data security – Immuta Discover provides accurate, granular metadata and actionable tags on sensitive data so users can seamlessly secure data across cloud platforms at scale. The product enables full metadata visibility into what data requires access controls and auditing. The metadata can be leveraged directly in Immuta Secure to govern the data and in Immuta Detect to monitor data access.
• Agentless, multi-cloud data discovery – Immuta Discover scans and classifies data natively, with no software to install and no agent running next to the cloud data platform. The data never leaves the data platform. This approach simplifies operations and is secure and compliant, enabling data teams to be more efficient with an always up-to-date data inventory.
• Out-of-the-box and customizable regulatory frameworks – Immuta Discover automatically categorizes data that is subject to leading regulatory frameworks such as CCPA, GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI, to implement compliant access control policies. These frameworks are created and maintained by Immuta's in-house Legal Engineering Team, and additionally enable customers to customize frameworks based on their interpretations of specific regulations for accelerated compliance.

"I am thrilled to see the addition and announcement of Immuta Discover to Immuta's Data Security Platform," said Sanjeev Mohan, former Gartner analyst and founder of SanjMo. "Efficiently tagging and classifying data is a critical first step in protecting it against the growing number of threats in today's data management landscape. Being able to scan data natively in the cloud data platform is an innovation that enables data discovery at scale."

Immuta offers a comprehensive Data Security Platform that enables sensitive data discovery, security and access control and activity monitoring. Immuta Discover automatically discovers and classifies sensitive data relevant to the leading regulatory frameworks. Immuta Detect adds critical user and data access behavior monitoring and auditing. And, Immuta Secure provides scalable data access control and enforcement across cloud data platforms. Together, these capabilities give customers comprehensive data security and governance for analytic workloads.

Transaction feeds into company’s vision for unified identity security for the modern enterprise

Today, the UK subsidiary of SailPoint Technologies, Inc., a leader in enterprise identity security, completed its acquisition of Osirium, a UK-based security company dedicated to solving complex access needs. This acquisition will feed into the company’s vision to unify visibility, oversight, and protection across all types of access, both regular and highly sensitive, into one solution.

“Enterprises don't have time to sort through access rights across disparate identity solutions, nor should they – the concept of seeing and managing sensitive access separately from regular access is a dated notion and does not scale in today's accelerated business environment,” said Grady Summers, EVP of Product, SailPoint. “With Osirium, we’ll deliver a holistic view of regular and sensitive access for our customers, versus requiring them to sort through multiple systems to cobble together a singular view of all types of access at any given time across their organization. This will provide immense clarity and real-time control for organizations over what and how all of their identities are accessing data and applications.”

This acquisition comes on the heels of and adds fuel to the company’s recently unveiled vision for the market, a unified approach to enterprise identity security, one that addresses every type of enterprise identity, every type and location of data, while managing risk across the spectrum. This next generation of identity security is underpinned by Atlas, SailPoint’s identity security platform that serves as the foundation for SailPoint Identity Security Cloud. Once integrated, the Osirium technology will become part of the SailPoint Identity Security Cloud offering.

“Current approaches to protecting privileged access simply cannot keep up with the rate of change happening across today’s enterprise, nor do they consider privileged access controls needed across the entire digital enterprise ecosystem. We believe privilege needs to extend beyond the realm of servers and databases today, providing holistic oversight and unified, policy-driven security controls for all types of access, and extending those controls to applications and data,” said Matt Mills, President of Worldwide Field Operations, SailPoint. “Other approaches either lack the automation needed to drive quicker, smarter decisions, or they attempt to converge various identity technologies together in an attempt to drive efficiency. Neither of these approaches work in fully securing today’s enterprise.”

Mills continued to explain, “At SailPoint, we believe that unified, AI-driven identity security is the clear path forward in enabling every enterprise to manage and secure – in real-time – all enterprise access to critical data and applications. This acquisition is just one piece of the puzzle as we look to drive this unified approach forward to the benefit of our customers worldwide.”

Fanbase, the ad-free social media platform that allows users to monetize their content and connect with their audience through various media features, announces that its current equity crowdfunding round has successfully crossed $4.50 million. This brings the total amount raised by Fanbase to $10 million.

This will be the third seed round for the general public to invest in Fanbase. Fanbase utilizes Startengine for Equity Crowdfunding to reinforce Fanbase's unwavering commitment to promoting equality and inclusivity in the realm of social media, especially for historically marginalized communities.

Founded by Isaac Hayes III, son of the famed Iconic Soul Icon, Isaac Hayes. Isaac's mission is to enable users to freely reach the entire social audience & democratize social media for all. That's why the company's brand promise is proudly "Be You. Without Limits." 

"Equity crowdfunding is our way of inviting the Fanbase community to own a piece of the platform they believe in. We're not just building a product; we're growing a community- driven ecosystem where every voice, every creator, and every supporter shares in our collective success." - Isaac Hayes III

This vision underpins Fanbase's objective of empowering users and providing them with a platform where their voices can truly be heard.

Fanbase has an innovative approach to social media monetization for users. Users can engage with a range of media features, including photo/video, audio chat, live streaming, stories, short-form, and long-form video. Fanbase offers the option for users to subscribe to each other through in-app purchases, fostering creativity and enabling all users to monetize their work directly via their Fanbase profiles. Fanbase distinguishes itself through its affordability and inclusivity. The app is free to download and use, allowing anyone to create a profile, build a following, and connect with others. 

Fanbase further extends their brand promise by taking advantage of the Obama administration's passed legislation, "The JOBS Act" .This allows main street small businesses and high-growth enterprises to raise capital from retail citizen investors more efficiently. Allowing small and young firms across the country to grow and hire faster, as well as giving everyday citizens the opportunity to invest in small startups.

Equity crowdfunding provides a unique opportunity for businesses to turn their customers into owners and create a more loyal user base ready to promote the business.

Waking up every day dedicated to improving the Fanbase user experience the funds raised in this successful equity crowdfunding round will be directed towards Fanbase's expansion and development initiatives. These funds will enhance user experience, enhance creator tools, improve platform features, and expand marketing efforts to reach a wider audience.

Fanbase Social Media extends an open invitation to all to join them in their mission to reshape the social media landscape, champion diversity, and ensure that every voice is heard.

New survey finds 70% of consumers feel personally connected to their favorite creators and 95% have learned something new from a creator, among other findings

Today, Teachable unveiled its inaugural consumer report, titled Creator Connections, on the trends and behaviors shaping fans and their favorite creators. The report, based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, tackles everything from the nitty gritty of what goes into winning content to the anatomy of developing authentic fan-creator connections.

Key findings include:

• Despite algorithms serving up endless streams of content, a majority of consumers only follow and meaningfully engage with one to five creators.
• 70% of consumers say they feel personally connected to the creators they're most engaged with—and roughly 66% of those consumers say they feel that connection within just a few days to weeks.
• 40% of consumers say their decision to buy creator products or content is influenced by a sincere desire to support creators, and this percentage rises to 50% among Gen Z.
• Beyond entertainment—95% of consumers say they've learned something new from a creator. What's more, 80% somewhat or strongly agree they've made noticeable improvements in their lives thanks to insights or guidance from a creator.
• Long-form social content is closing in on short-form as Gen Z's favorite format. Of note, live streams emerged as the third favorite across all generations. Plus, the majority of consumers prefer less-produced content.

"It takes a highly engaged community—of fans, followers, students, subscribers, you name it—for creators to achieve long-term, sustainable growth. And that growth is the north star for even the biggest and best creators out there," says Mark Haseltine, Teachable CEO. "With this report, we set out to understand the trends shaping the people who are logging on, tuning in, and religiously following creators of all kinds. We hope these new insights help not just our Teachable creators, but creators across the industry who are looking to find new and better ways to deliver content, products, and experiences that make an impact—in the here and now, and for some time to come."

With a few clicks, developers can now sign up and integrate Pixalate’s advertising fraud prevention technology into their apps and websites without signing long-term contracts

Pixalate, the global market-leading ad fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform, today announced general availability of its self-service Ad Fraud Prevention API. With no annual commitments or upfront costs, developers and publishers of all sizes can access Pixalate’s reliable and low-latency solution to easily scale and grow. 

Pixalate APIs are powered by the company’s MRC-accredited Analytics platform. Accreditation areas include sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) detection & filtration for both display and video across Connected TV (CTV), mobile app, mobile web, and desktop.

Access to MRC-accredited ad fraud prevention tools has historically been limited to large, enterprise sized publishers & developers. Pixalate’s self-service API gives smaller developers an upper hand to scale their platforms by protecting existing ad revenue streams and fortifying the integrity of their advertising inventory against bad actors.

Using most globally-accepted credit cards, customers can sign up in minutes, choose the plan that’s right for them, and immediately incorporate Pixalate’s ad fraud prevention insights into their apps. Subscriptions start at $99 a month and give developers the freedom to adjust based on usage. When a customer exceeds a plan’s usage quota, consumption-based pricing kicks in without any interruption to the service.

Key Benefits Include:

• Reduce clawbacks. Protects publishers & developers’ revenue by taking steps to improve ad traffic quality.
• Align with major exchanges. Enable developers to use the same ad fraud technology as major exchanges.
• Combat ad fraud. Prevents 40+ types of invalid traffic (IVT) & fraud vectors that harm app traffic quality.
• Prevent getting blocklisted. Bake fraud prevention into apps from the ground up.
• Billing Dashboard. View real-time API usage and charges on the billing dashboard.
• Ease of Integration. With just a few clicks, any developer can sign up with a freemium plan and begin integrating the APIs with a few lines of code.

API Input Parameters:

• IP address: Analyzes an IP address (either IPv4 or IPv6) to check for any associated risks.
• Device Identifier: Examines the device identifier to detect any abnormalities or signs of fraudulent activity.
• User Agent: Evaluates the user agent data to identify potentially malicious software or bots.

API Output Parameters:

• Fraud Risk Assessment: Subscribers can request a risk score from Pixalate’s servers to gauge the likelihood of an IP, Device ID, or User Agent being compromised or engaged in malicious activity.

Platforms Supported

• Websites
• Mobile (iOS, Android) 
• Connected TV (Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, tvOS and more)

SDKs

• iOS
• Android

Kubecost broadens its granular, real-time, and developer-friendly cost management capabilities across the cloud cost ecosystem

Kubecost, the comprehensive solution for monitoring, managing, and optimizing Kubernetes spend at scale, today announced that it has added cloud cost support to the open source project, OpenCost. This addition allows OpenCost to support accessing provider billing and cloud cost visibility beyond Kubernetes across AWS, Azure, and GCP — with support for more platforms to come.

OpenCost launched in 2022 with code donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) by Kubecost. OpenCost has provided valuable cost monitoring for thousands of users looking to get insight into a single cluster. Kubecost is now expanding OpenCost’s capabilities with budgeting, forecasting, alerting, and savings recommendations across multiple clusters and multiple clouds, as a key step toward adopting and implementing the FinOps Foundation’s FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification (FOCUS).

The OpenCost project has been closely aligned with FOCUS, and will be an open source implementation of the FOCUS 1.0 specification. Supported by the FinOps Foundation and industry leaders, including Kubecost, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Accenture, FOCUS is a technical specification to build and maintain an open standard for cloud cost, usage, and billing data.

OpenCost and Kubecost are proud to embrace emerging industry standards such as FOCUS by providing technical users and developers an easy way to effectively implement FOCUS within multi-cloud environments. While many cloud cost tools are not built for use by developer teams, Kubecost has concentrated on delivering solutions that bring cost visibility and analysis to engineering, DevOps, and other technical teams. The FinOps Foundation 2023 State of FinOps survey pinpointed that empowering engineers to take action is the biggest FinOps challenge organizations face in 2023. With today’s announcement of expanded cloud cost management coverage, Kubecost continues to address this gap head-on.

“OpenCost and Kubecost are committed to supporting FOCUS through our cloud cost for multi-cloud infrastructure functionality,” said Webb Brown, CEO and co-founder of Kubecost. “FOCUS is a new open approach to cloud cost monitoring. By implementing FOCUS, we believe we’ll further be able to make the lives of developers, engineers, FinOps and other technical personas that are hands-on managing infrastructure cost much more manageable.”

“We’re excited to see open source projects like OpenCost integrate and align around this new specification, which will help extend the benefits of FOCUS to a wider group of users," said Udam Dewaraja, Chairperson for the FOCUS Working Group. "The FOCUS project continues to gain industry-wide momentum and contributors for its ability to bring together practitioners, cloud service providers, vendors, and consultants around a common specification for presenting cloud cost and usage data.”