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.
Franz Inc., a supplier of Graph Database technology for Knowledge Graph Solutions, and Smartlogic, a Semantic AI platform vendor, announced a collaboration aimed to help large enterprises accelerate the timeframe to deploy scalable, distributed Semantic Knowledge Graph solutions. The Franz Inc. and Smartlogic combination provides organizations with end-to-end technology along with the expertise to quickly create enterprise-scale Semantic Knowledge Graphs, which serve as the underpinning for Artificial Intelligence applications.
AllegroGraph is a Semantic Graph based platform that allows infinite data integration through a unique approach that unifies all data and siloed knowledge into an Entity-Event Knowledge Graph solution that can support massive, big data analytics. The FedShard capability within AllegroGraph utilizes federated sharding functionality that drives holistic insights and enables complex reasoning across a distributed Knowledge Graph. Semaphore provides a semantic layer in the enterprise digital ecosystem to manage knowledge models, automatically extract and classify the context and meaning from structured and unstructured information, and generate rich semantic metadata.
Franz’s Knowledge Graph Solution includes both technology and services for building Entity-Event Knowledge Graphs based on tools, products, knowledge, skills and experience. Franz delivers the expertise for designing ontology and taxonomy-based solutions by utilizing standards-based development processes and tools.
Pitch, a collaborative presentation platform for modern teams, announced that it has raised an $85 million Series B funding round led by Lakestar and Tiger Global, and joined by existing Pitch investors Index Ventures and Thrive Capital. Pitch plans to use the new funding to develop its core technology and product, grow its global team, and extend its software platform across the entire presentation workflow.
A publishing and content ecosystem: Pitch is building a dedicated home for publishing and exchanging presentations and templates. Users will be able to discover content from creators and brands, and publish their own work directly to public profile pages.
Advanced presentation analytics: Pitch is building new integrated solutions for users to better distribute presentations and monitor performance. Rolling out this summer, these new features will enable secure sharing and advanced analytics within Pitch, and will give users detailed insights into the reach and readership of a presentation, and engagement levels on specific slides.
Narrative recording and playback: Pitch is building new ways to highlight, record, and play back presentations in any context. Designed for a more remote, asynchronous world of work, these tools will ensure presenters and recipients can engage across an expanded range of meeting formats and team workflows.
DataStax announced a collaboration with NetApp to deliver full lifecycle management for cloud native data in its DataStax Enterprise database as well as open source Apache Cassandra clusters. As part of this partnership, the two companies have worked together to integrate the NetApp Astra data management service for Kubernetes workloads with DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra to provide a single pane of glass management for Cassandra data in modern containerized environments. With the tested and certified DataStax and NetApp solution, enterprises can automate the implementation of Cassandra clusters as well as simplify operations and lifecycle management processes around applications, data and container images on Kubernetes. The DataStax and NetApp integration provides:
Faster delivery of business applications through automatic storage provisioning and storage class setup processes
Improved application unit and system testing efficiency with cloning and migration of application clusters
Rich data management services, including data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery, active cloning, activity log. This supports rapid recovery from a disaster, or point-in-time copy recovery of DataStax Enterprise or Apache Cassandra clusters
Seamless portability and migration for Cassandra clusters, supporting enterprises with moving Kubernetes workloads and data between cloud locations
Consistent data management user interface with clear visualization of data protection status.
Netlify, a cloud for collaborative web development, has acquired FeaturePeek, a startup that enables developer teams to preview frontend content. Netlify has added FeaturePeek’s developer collaboration product as a core capability in the next generation of Netlify Deploy Previews. Available today, Deploy Previews make it easy for developers to gather feedback with their web teams, including internal and external business stakeholders, product managers, designers and marketers. Teams share URLs to review a preview of the website or web application and can leave contextual feedback directly on a UI that overlays the site. All feedback is synced in the pull request or productivity tool of choice. Deploy Previews offer:
Live automated previews: Netlify automatically builds a new Deploy Preview as a unique permanent URL for each pull/merge, posted as a commit status.
A floating UI that overlays the deploy: Without leaving the browser, reviewers can make comments, take and annotate screenshots, record videos and reply to teammates asynchronously on web projects.
Feedback automatically synced to the Git repo host.
Integration with productivity tools: Progress can be synced to tools like Clubhouse.io, GitHub, Linear and Trello.
Testing and troubleshooting on different devices: Netlify records browser metadata for every review so engineers can reproduce bugs.
Google Workspace announced smart canvas, a new collaboration experience that builds on its vision for the future of work. Smart canvas makes it easier for people to stay connected, focus their time and attention, and transform their ideas into impact. With smart canvas, Google Workspace is enhancing Docs, Sheets, and Slides to make them more flexible, interactive, and intelligent. New interactive building blocks connect people, content, and events into one seamless experience, while flexible formats remove unnecessary constraints.
Smart chips in Docs allow users to type @ to see a list of recommended files, people and meetings to include in their work.
Checklists help users quickly capture tasks in Docs.
Table templates in Docs enable users to create topic-voting tables to gather team feedback and project-tracker tables.
Pageless format in Docs allows users to remove the boundaries of a page to create a surface that expands to whatever device or screen they’re using.
New views in Sheets help users better manage and interact with data. A timeline view will make tracking tasks easier and faster.
Additional assisted writing features in Docs will surface warnings about offensive language, and add stylistic suggestions.
More assisted analysis functionality in Sheets on the web makes suggestions that help build and troubleshoot formulas.
Text IQ announced the launch of Text IQ for Privacy, an AI solution to enable enterprises to proactively manage personal information, particularly hard-to-find sensitive information which otherwise remains hidden in large unstructured data sets. It automatically identifies and categorizes personal and sensitive information from both structured and unstructured sources, enabling redaction and deduplication before presenting the findings for human review.
Enterprises must manage ever expanding amounts of personal and sensitive data, such as a customer’s financial records, precise geo-location, race, religion, and medical history. Traditional search methods typically fall short when it comes to data containing information such as a person’s religious beliefs and medical history, which can be sensitive when seen in context and hard to identify because it is largely found strewn in unstructured data. Text IQ for Privacy zeroes in on this kind of data by deploying an adaptive AI Brain that incorporates a human-centric Socio-Linguistic Hypergraph. Text IQ for Privacy includes:
Data Categorization, to identify sensitive information and eliminate manual data mapping.
Discovery & Redaction, to identify personal information and reduce disclosure risk.
Data Breach Response, to automatically deduplicate and associate data to entities, and reduce response time.
DSAR Fulfillment Automation, to meet request deadlines and reduce manual review.
