Bloomreach announced the launch of its new headless content module, Bloomreach Content. Bloomreach Content is built for commerce, enabling marketers and merchandisers to work as one to build immersive e-commerce experiences that enhance the customer journey.
Businesses of all kinds differentiate through immersive storytelling — content, images, and personalization that connect with customers and encourage them to convert with confidence. To achieve this, marketers and merchandisers must be empowered to work together, seamlessly connecting content and products throughout the consumer’s researching and shopping journey. Bloomreach Content helps close this gap with three areas of differentiation:
Fully SaaS: The Bloomreach Content module is fully SaaS, meaning it’s nimble, easy to implement, upgrades are automatic.
Merchandiser-friendly: Bloomreach Content offers marketers and merchandisers the ability to build and control the customer journey across digital channels, creating, testing, and customizing targeted, on-brand digital experiences.
Commerce-specific tools: Bloomreach Content users can enjoy fast page creation; in-page product merchandising; page scheduling; an API-first architecture; the ability to launch, manage, and customize campaign-specific landing pages and microsites, and more.
The new Bloomreach Content module is also integrated with modern commerce storefronts including Vue Storefront, Next.js Commerce, React Storefront 8, and SAP Spartacus, and supports modern web development platform partners Layer0, Netlify, and Vercel.
MerlinOne announced NOMAD, their new technology to search the visual content of objects, with no dependence on textual metadata. Need a photo of four people at a picnic? Just ask NOMAD to find it for you. Organizations may have their photos, graphics, illustrations and videos in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, but they still cannot find the right object they need while on deadline for a campaign. The problem is the scarcity of useful textual metadata which, so far, has been the only way DAM users can search their collections.
By applying a combination of Deep Learning AI technologies (all developed in-house by MerlinOne) to your search query, NOMAD understands the concept you are looking for and delivers precise results based solely on the visual content of an image, completely independent of the existence or accuracy of its metadata.
NOMAD understands language patterns as well as visual content. Just like it knows to group visually similar images, it also clusters phrases of similar meaning, reducing the dependency on a specific, controlled vocabulary to find what you’re looking for. NOMAD can be combined with other MerlinAI tools such as IMPACT and Visual Similarity to provide additional search capabilities.
This week we have articles by Kate Kaye, and Sarah Wang and Martin Casado, and news from Coveo, Quantum, Druid, Kentico, Retresco, and Mirakl.
Opinion / Analysis
Google may have to play nice in Privacy Sandbox, thanks to U.K. antitrust authority’s role as referee
Image by tookapic from Pixabay
Kate Kaye reports on Googles commitment to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to allow them
to take up a role in the design and development of Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals to ensure they do not distort competition. The CMA is now launching a consultation on whether to accept Google’s commitments. If accepted, the commitments would be legally binding.
This is related to CMA’s enforcement action against Google, the lack of support for FloC, and likely responsible for Googles recent decision to extend the life of cookies for two years. Kaye mentions the W3C, where there are ongoing discussions about privacy and what should be in a Privacy Sandbox, but it is not clear what CMA’s role would be —”referee” seems aspirational. It should be noted that Google is a master at creating industry initiatives and using their resources to influence or control development outcomes. FloC, AMP, Core Vitals, and schema.org structured data are all examples. (For deep dives see Michael Andrews’ Who benefits from schema.org?, and Scott Gilbertson on Core vitals and AMP).
A16z’s Sarah Wang and Martin Casado provide an eye-opening analysis of the short and long term costs of cloud computing. The near-term time-to-market and cost benefits of cloud are clear and well known, but over time they report
Across all our conversations with diverse practitioners, the pattern has been remarkably consistent: If you’re operating at scale, the cost of cloud can at least double your infrastructure bill. … the cost of cloud “takes over” at some point, locking up hundreds of billions of market cap that are now stuck in this paradox: You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it.
The infrastructure costs go up if you stay on the cloud, and the cost and difficulty of moving off the cloud increase over time. They do offer some advice — mine is to read their article.
The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.
