Bridgeline Digital, Inc., a provider of marketing software, announced the release date of its HawkSearch "Smart Search" technology, set for March 15, 2024. Smart Search introduces two new ways to search, Concept and Visual Search, changing how customers interact with search and leading to increased engagement and revenue for businesses.

HawkSearch will introduce its “Zeus” update for Smart Search and GenAI capabilities on March 15, 2024. This update introduces AI-powered Concept and Visual Search to help HawkSearch customers generate more revenue. Smart Search uses AI models, vector databases, and large language models to process customer queries, whether typed or through images. For instance, Visual Search allows a customer to upload an image of a product, and HawkSearch will show similar items for purchase. Concept Search lets users describe their needs in natural language, and the system finds relevant products or information.

John Murcott, EVP of Product & Strategy, stated, “Integrating our features into existing interfaces ensures a smooth transition for users, maintaining our commitment to providing accessible solutions for eCommerce site users to find and purchase what they need.”

Ari Kahn, CEO, said, “Smart Search's introduction has shown its value, with customers like Max Warehouse, Nail Gun Depot, and Rainbow Resource Center adopting the technology. The Zeus release makes this technology generally available (GA), including the entire HawkSearch customer base, providing AI capabilities to help customers grow revenue on their sites."

GOCare, a SaaS provider of digital experience software, is excited to announce its strategic partnership with Fastwyre Broadband. Fastwyre is focused on enhancing the customer experience as they accelerate adding subscribers to their growing fiber broadband network. GOCare's Messenger and Reach solutions were selected by Fastwyre Broadband to empower customers with real-time, two-way SMS notifications, self-help options and ensure more convenient digital customer engagement.  GOCare solutions will integrate with other key Fastwyre solution partners including, Calix and CHR Solutions (Omnia360 B/OSS).

Fastwyre Broadband's partnership / collaboration with GOCare aligns with their commitment to providing clear communication and dynamic customer service to the communities they serve. GOCare facilitates proactive and interactive communications with subscribers via their mobile devices in advance of customer inquiries, such as appointments, billing/payment updates and even network outages. This solution has a track record of reducing inbound subscriber calls and enhancing the subscriber experience.

"We selected GOCare based on their experience with our eco-system solutions, including Calix and CHR Solutions, their reputation for rapid deployment, and the positive feedback from customers who love the solution," stated Keith Soldan, CFO of Fastwyre Broadband. "Fastwyre strives to deliver a truly differentiated subscriber experience and an advanced network", concluded Keith.

"GOCare is proud to add Fastwyre to our growing list of clients. It is imperative that broadband providers adopt a focus on elevating the customer experience. Many providers focus on speed and industry jargon. Subscribers overwhelmingly prefer a friendly experience, digital communication channels, and value for their dollar." stated Mike Roddy, CEO of GOCare. Today's customers are more technically savvy and have higher expectations. GOCare's clients experience better operating metrics by delivering a customer experience that goes beyond words. We look forward to engaging with the Fastwyre team to deliver the best customer experience in the broadband industry," assured Roddy.

Reach targets qualified contacts, drives event registration and generates leads for event marketers

Banzai International, Inc., a leading marketing technology company that provides essential marketing and sales solutions, today announced an expansion of Reach, its event marketing solution.

This expansion includes the creation of an operating business unit, investment in new technology systems to support customers more efficiently, and an expanded strategic focus within Banzai to serve additional customers. This expansion is in response to an increase in pipeline for the Reach audience acquisition solution that Banzai has seen in Q1 2024.

Events have become a critical component of effective marketing strategies, providing a unique opportunity to engage with target audiences in a face-to-face setting. However, it's often a challenge for marketers to attract the right individuals to their events, with many resorting to broad, untargeted promotional tactics like large email campaigns or organic social media blasts. This “spray and pray” approach often fails to reach the most relevant and interested prospects.

Despite a temporary hiatus post-pandemic, the field marketing industry is now experiencing significant growth. Projections indicate a $1 trillion market value increase from 2019 to 2032, growing at a CAGR of 6.4% from 2023 to 2032. Heightened expectations for successful events reflect the industry's recovery and increasing value placed on face-to-face interactions. According to the 2023 Gartner Tech Marketing Benchmarks Survey, “technology marketers increased investments [in events] by close to 5 percentage points between 2022 and 2023.”

Reach helps marketers drive event registration by inviting a company's ideal audience through personalized multi-channel campaigns. Leveraging Banzai’s Audience AI feature, Reach targets potential attendees from a database of over 379 million professionals by geographic region, industry, job title and more to fill rooms and sales pipelines. ThoughtSpot, an AI analytics company, saw a 75% increase in registration rates and generated approximately $1 million in new sales pipeline after utilizing Reach.

“We have observed an increase in demand for audience acquisition solutions for both webinars and field marketing. This represents a reversal in market trend from what we saw in 2020-2023 when marketing teams had a sharp decline in field marketing demand due to COVID-19 restrictions,” said Joe Davy, CEO and chairman of Banzai. “We are choosing to continue investing in our Reach business to meet market demand for our customers. Event attendance is a major challenge for marketers utilizing field marketing or webinars as a strategy. Reach enables customers to focus on event and webinar execution while supplementing their event audiences to increase their overall ROI.”

Leading organizations like ServiceNow, RingCentral, and Tanium use Reach as part of their event marketing strategy.

 Couchbase, Inc., the cloud database platform company, today announced the expansion of its executive leadership team with the appointment of Julie Irish as senior vice president and chief information officer. In this role, Irish will drive Couchbase's global IT strategy in alignment with the company's key business objectives.

Irish brings nearly 20 years of experience leading business operations, information technology, system implementation, migrations and strategic planning. She was most recently vice president of business applications and IT at New Relic where she scaled the function, led the delivery of complex IT projects and supported the company's migration to a consumption-based business model. Before that, Irish held leadership positions at Harvard Business Publishing and startup RichRelevance.

"Julie's appointment marks a key milestone in the next phase of Couchbase's expansion, and we're very pleased to welcome her as our first CIO," said Matt Cain, chair, president and CEO of Couchbase. "With an excellent track record and deep expertise in technology innovation, Julie's leadership will further enable our world-class team as we scale beyond inflection and unlock the next phase of our growth with our database-as-a-service Couchbase Capella."

Irish will lead the global IT and security team and will set the strategy for systems and IT to position Couchbase's internal infrastructure for future growth and effectiveness. Her extensive experience leading organizations through complexity and building strong business partnering teams will be essential in accelerating Couchbase's business expansion while equipping the global team with improved systems, tools and processes.

"The strategic use of technology is critical to scaling across all functions to drive growth. It's an exciting time to join Couchbase as more customers transition to the Couchbase Capella offering and consumption models. Couchbase has built a strong technology foundation, and I am honored to join the company contributing my insights, setting strategic priorities and collaborating with the world-class team," added Irish.

Virtualized Environments Deliver Flexible, Scalable, and Cost-Efficient Cloud-Based PoC Demonstrations

TD SYNNEX, a leading global distributor and solutions aggregator for the IT ecosystem, has launched TD SYNNEX Cloud Labs, a solution designed to accelerate the go-to-market process for vendors by providing a virtualized environment for Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrations at cloud scale. 

TD SYNNEX Cloud Labs offers a virtualized environment that supports Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to address the growing challenges faced by the industry in delivering flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient PoC environments. The visibility into product performance is specifically instrumental in validating purchasing decisions.

"As cloud adoption continues to reshape business operations, the need for robust cloud-native infrastructure has become increasingly critical. Cloud Labs represents a significant leap forward in addressing the challenges vendors face in this landscape,” said Peter Zonneveld, Vice President, Global Solutions Aggregation and Innovation, TD SYNNEX. “According to CSO Insights, 92% of buyers want to know how the product can add value early in the sales cycle. By providing a solution that meets the vendors’ needs where they are in their product lifecycle, we empower vendors to bring their solutions to market faster and more effectively."

Leveraging TD SYNNEX's global solutions aggregation and automation expertise, Cloud Labs serves as a simulated production environment, enabling vendors and partners within the IT channel to bring products to market faster and at scale through showcasing product features and services seamlessly to end users. Vendors are empowered with the flexibility to stand up the environment through any of the leading cloud providers.

Additional Cloud Labs features and benefits include:

• Cost Efficiency: Eliminates the need for costly lab environments and infrastructure management, reducing resources needed for support and maintenance.
• Cloud Scalability: Provides flexibility and adaptability to virtual PoC and product demonstration processes.
• Time Savings: Shortens sales cycles, saving hours of time, and increasing ROI.
• Ease of Use: Enables vendors to create even the most complicated PoC environments with just a few clicks.
• Pay-per-Use Model: Vendors pay only for the resources used, optimizing cost-effectiveness.

Industry Veteran Takes the Helm in Expanding Global Data Ad Platform Partnerships in Ad-supported Streaming Market 

 IRIS.TV, the leading content data platform, announced today the promotion of Nancy Neumann-Grey to the position of Senior Vice President of Business Development. 

Neumann-Grey initially joined IRIS.TV as Vice President of Business Development and Data Partnerships, bringing over two decades of experience in digital marketing to the company. In her previous role, she played a significant role in growing critical relationships with data partners globally, implementing go-to-market plans, and contributing to the overall success of IRIS.TV's collaboration with data partners.

In her new position as the first SVP of Business Development, Neumann-Grey will report directly to Richie Hyden, Co-Founder, President & COO at IRIS.TV. She will lead a dedicated team focused on unifying the support for bringing data partners' products into the streaming market and enabling ad platform partners to utilize the data in their platforms effectively.

Neumann-Grey will also assume responsibility for IRIS.TV's global ad platform partnerships across ad servers, SSPs, and DSPs, ensuring IRIS-enabled data availability to buyers and sellers. Her deep experience gained from roles at eXelate, Nielsen, and Visa uniquely positions her to excel in this expanded role.

"Nancy's wealth of experience, honed over two decades in the digital marketing industry, makes her the perfect candidate to lead our global business development efforts across our data partner and ad platform ecosystems," said Richie Hyden, Co-Founder, President, and COO of IRIS.TV. We couldn't be happier for Nancy to take on a larger remit with us and know it will be a great success for us all."

"Joining this remarkable team has been an incredible journey, and I'm grateful for the trust placed in me," said Nancy Neumann-Grey, Senior Vice President, Business Development, IRIS.TV. "With data playing an increasingly important role in digital advertising, I look forward to leading IRIS.TV's initiatives to empower our partners to monetize their data effectively while helping advertisers reach their desired KPIs."

Nancy will be building a team to support new partnerships effectively.

New CMO appointment signals Fireblocks' ambitions to ensure the onchain economy is underpinned and secured by non-custodial and decentralized technologies 

Fireblocks, an enterprise platform for building blockchain applications and managing digital asset operations, announced today the strategic appointment of Michal Ferguson as the company's new Chief Marketing Officer. Ferguson's appointment further solidifies Fireblocks' dedication to advancing the widespread adoption of non-custodial and counterparty-free-risk markets for both individual users and institutions. This appointment comes on the heels of key additions to the team, including Michael Levine from Payoneer as Chief Financial Officer and Madan Gadde, formerly of FIS, as Chief Customer Officer.

"The explosion of new innovations over the last six months has led to a 'crypto renaissance' that is spreading like wildfire across financial and non-financial sectors," said Michael Shaulov, CEO of Fireblocks. "In welcoming Michal, the collective prowess of our leadership team drives us towards our goal of serving thousands of new businesses and equipping everyone with the tools they need to securely deliver new onchain apps, products and services at scale."

High-profile exchange failures have fueled a surge in interest for solutions that mitigate counterparty risk. This trend is reflected in the growing popularity of self-custody wallets and counterparty-free, or decentralized, exchanges and lending markets. A 2023 report by Chainalysis revealed a significant rise in users adopting self-custody solutions, highlighting a preference for managing their own digital assets instead of relying on third-party custodians. In parallel, the growth of the Total Value Locked in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) further shows the increasing interest in alternative financial mechanisms that eliminate the need for intermediaries, thereby reducing counterparty risk.

"It is such a pivotal time to join the Fireblocks team, particularly as we stand at the cusp of another great market expansion," said Michal Ferguson, Fireblocks CMO. "The platform's versatility and our commitment to addressing the evolving needs of digital assets' growing customer base has enabled us to make massive strides across payments, tokenization, and onchain development. With the anticipation of doubling the number of active customers this year, our goal is to ensure that we safeguard every new dollar that gets onboarded into the crypto and digital asset ecosystem." 

Prior to joining Fireblocks, Ferguson built and scaled the go-to-market functions at Snyk, a cybersecurity platform that integrates directly into development tools, workflows, and automation pipelines valued at $7.4 billion. The upgrade in executive leadership follows a stellar year of growth with the Fireblocks platform recording $53 billion in monthly outbound volume and a 160% increase in monthly active wallets. As CMO, Ferguson will spearhead Fireblocks' charge to make counterparty-risk-free infrastructure ubiquitous across retail and institutional products and services.

To date, developers, startups and institutions have used Fireblocks' non-custodial, MPC technology to build CeFi and DeFi exchanges, global liquidity networks, compliant staking solutions, web3 games, asset tokenization, cross-border payments, NFT marketplaces, smart contracts and more.

New Creator Calendar gives marketers a preview of creator’s upcoming life moments for early and exclusive partnership access.

#paid, a leading creator marketplace, has announced the release of its new Creator Calendar, allowing brands to preview upcoming creator life moments and lock in partnerships upfront, for more meaningful ways to collaborate. 

Traditionally, marketers have relied on Upfronts to preview broadcast content. However, in the world of creator marketing, there has never been a way to preview a creator's upcoming life moments at scale. The Creator Calendar empowers brands to align their tent-pole campaigns with relevant moments in real-time, fostering more authentic and impactful partnerships.

#paid regularly collects and aggregates proprietary insights from its large creator network, designed to provide brands and marketers with early access to upcoming key moments and events in a creator’s calendar. This exclusive access ensures that brands are first to connect with creators to build strategic campaigns before these moments happen, not after.

"We gather extensive life insights and frequently update the Creator Calendar. Our team is committed to maintaining up-to-date information by actively engaging with our trusted network of creators," stated Adam Rivietz, Chief Strategy Officer at #paid. "Our goal is to enable brands to be the first—or only—partner for creators during key moments, fostering long-term, impactful relationships."

Kira Kosarin, a multifaceted actor, recording artist, and content creator, emphasized the importance of advanced planning for creators and brands alike. "As a creator, my schedule evolves rapidly, and having the ability to align with brands in advance ensures that partnerships are authentic and resonate with my audience," said Kosarin. "By integrating brand partnerships seamlessly into my life moments, we create content that feels genuine and drives meaningful engagement."

Brand partnerships during these key moments are limited, and the Creator Calendar gives brands a chance to get ahead and secure collaborations for creator life events. By strategically planning for these moments, brands can more naturally integrate creator partnerships into their annual and quarterly campaign plans.