Widen launched upgrades to the Widen Collective, its platform that combines digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) into one solution. The Collective equips brands to bring together product data, marketing content, and digital assets, send them anywhere their customers shop, and automate the steps in that process. The upgrades will help brands establish a product content supply chain that minimizes manual steps. Marketing teams often struggle to bring products to market efficiently when the required product data, marketing content, and digital assets are siloed in multiple systems and files. The Widen Collective offers a central place to assemble, manage, and distribute all product information. Upgrades include:
Product hierarchies. Marketers can categorize their product catalog into a hierarchy with product brands, families, and lines that is reflective of what customers see online.
Product variants. When marketers update specs like dimensions, weight, and materials for a “parent” product, the new data automatically cascades to every product variant in that family.
Auto-updating portals. Users can configure portals to automatically ingest the newest product assets based on metadata rules.
E-commerce syndication bundle. Brands can purchase Widen’s combined DAM and PIM solution in a bundle with Productsup, an e-commerce syndication platform.
Quickbase, a no-code platform for operational agility, announced a new partnership with Lucid, a provider of visual collaboration software, allowing anyone to visualize complex ideas and bring them to life. Quickbase and Lucid help eliminate complexity by connecting Lucidchart to the Quickbase platform. Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming application within the Lucid visual collaboration suite that empowers teams to clarify complexity and align insights. Ideas structured and developed in Lucidchart can serve as a strong foundation to diagram a Quickbase no-code application, helping collaborate on new ideas and adopt technology-driven solutions to business challenges. Lucid and Quickbase are working together to build cross-platform integrations that will make it possible to transform Lucidchart diagrams into fully operational business applications in Quickbase. More seamless integration helps citizen developers to:
Deliver Value Faster: Visualization capabilities allow for clarity and streamlined decision-making, helping accelerate pace of new solutions
Collaborate Easier: Visualizing processes, requirements and potential workflows improves communication and collaboration with stakeholders
Build Applications Users Love: User feedback is faster and easier to incorporate throughout the application lifecycle
First, an update on some upcoming changes. Last November I started a weekly content technology news newsletter to complement the monthly Advisor. I kept them separate to gauge the level of interest in curated product news. It’s clear that the vast majority of you are interested in both, so starting soon we’ll be combining the two types of content into a single weekly that will contain both recommended reading and product news. Those of you more interested in the opinion and research articles will now have something to read every week.
I’m still working out how much of each type of content to include for an optimal experience for busy readers. There may be a bit of experimentation involved, and I look forward to your thoughts. You can reach me anytime at frank@gilbane.com.
Thanks for being a subscriber! Frank
In this issue we have recommended reading on Twitter and subscriptions, collaboration platforms, AI meets BI, blockchains for content creators and publishers, an open source alternative to GPT-3, automated image content generation for marketing, and CMS adoption and use tips, and the return of the Journal of IA.
Our content technology news weekly will be out Wednesday as usual.
Market-Making on the Internet
Has Twitter finally found a path to growth that leverages its appeal, assets, and market position? Are they getting their mojo back? It is certainly not unreasonable to be skeptical, but they have made lots of moves in the last few weeks. The most interesting are the acquisitions of Substack competitor Revue, and Scroll, which provides publishers an alternative to ad-dependence for revenue. Twitter plans to use both these products in a new subscription offering that includes newsletters and websites.
Stratechery’s Ben Thompson has an enthusiastic take on this and digs into why he thinks this is an excellent monetization strategy for Twitter. (This article is not behind his paywall.)
Salesforce and Microsoft have an uphill battle to own collaboration
This may sound unlikely given the popularity of Teams and Slack combined with the resources of the parent companies. But the pincer movement of integration requirements from legacy solutions and new insurgent applications are an expense and drag on growth for all platforms. And the ceaseless battle for customer facing control guarantees software applications will continue to add their own collaboration capabilities. Microsoft and Salesforce will be fine (all applications have some integration needs), but so will a growing number of insurgents. Protocol’s Joe Williams goes into more detail.
A media ownership model: Why subscribe when you can invest?
Jarrod Dicker, who you may know from the Washington Post, Blockchain startup Po.et, Time, Huffington, and The RebelMouse content management system, has been pushing for a blockchain-based platform for content creators and publishers for years. He was, may still be, a little ahead of the curve, but this article was published on Mirror, a platform implementing this structure for writers today.
This new media structure will be wholly owned by the creators, operators and consumers themselves. It will be a product of both the public and its producers and will not limit participants to a single company. These media companies can be looked at as collectives, with their own identities, where creators and consumers are encouraged to flow interdependently throughout various collectives. All of which results in everyone investing in both the development of each collective and sharing in the value of the collective’s upside.
Business intelligence is an obvious use case for machine learning and shares getting-started challenges with other applications. This article starts with well-known warnings, but then goes deeper, describing the need for an “AI teacher”, getting into specifics of master data requirements, and explaining why a knowledge graph is critical for BI.
The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. We also publish curated content technology news weekly We do not sell or share personal data.
