Mirakl, an enterprise marketplace SaaS platform, announced it has joined the Adobe Exchange Partner Program as a Premier Partner. The new partnership builds upon the existing integration between Mirakl and Adobe Commerce, powered by Magento, and equips Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source customers with the technology, expertise, and ecosystem to build and operate enterprise marketplaces. Customers using Mirakl and Adobe Commerce or Magento Open Source together gain access to eCommerce solutions that, when combined, help them serve customers better and adapt their business to lead in the changing eCommerce landscape. Benefits include:
Accelerate time to market: Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source customers can leverage pre-built integrations to launch a Mirakl-powered marketplace in days and quickly onboard marketplace sellers.
Operate your enterprise marketplace at scale: The Mirakl Marketplace Platform enables Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source customers to quickly expand their online product offerings, reach new buyers, and develop customer loyalty through improved availability and broader assortment.
Tap into expertise developed through the implementation and optimization of 300+ enterprise marketplaces: Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source customers that launch marketplaces powered by Mirakl gain access to Mirakl’s marketplace expertise and ecosystem of partners.
Kentico released Kentico Experience Refresh 2. The new release includes:
Sentiment analysis. A JS or C# integration with Azure Text Sentiment Analysis so marketers can use AI to analyze the sentiment of users’ comments and set up automated responses and notifications depending on the tone of the text. Also, they can measure the sentiment of their own texts directly in the text editor.
Copy-pasting widgets in Page Builder. Until now, if editors wanted to use the same widget on a different page, they had to create the same widget with the same settings in another template. Now, copy-pasting up to ten widgets saves time and prevent mistakes.
Form Builder Section Properties. New feature enables dividing forms into sections and setting different properties for each of them. Developers can define section properties and then, marketers can add titles, styles, descriptions, or even dynamic layouts anywhere in the form.
Creating clean multicultural URLs. Is a new solution for creating URLs of multicultural websites. Culture Alias Support for Dynamic Routing now allows system administrators to define their own culture aliases and use them in URLs for distinguishing different language versions. For example, instead of ‘en-US’, you can use ‘en’ or ‘english’.
This week we have articles by Tom Warren, Eric Seufert, Prukalpa Sankar, and news from Expert.ai, Contentsquare, Language I/O, LivePerson and Adobe, DataStax, and DataRobot.
We had a server glitch with two June issues causing some of you not to receive them. Here are links if you need them: June 2 and June 9.
Opinion / Analysis
Microsoft’s new Fluid office documents
Microsoft’s updated Whiteboard app. Image: Microsoft
The Fluid Framework was demonstrated at Build 2019, and at Build 2020 Fluid was previewed and made open source. Starting this summer we’ll see released versions of some Fluid functionality, including in the updated version of Microsoft Whiteboard shown above.
Fluid is interesting for two reasons. First, it’s a partial realization of the ambitious document computing models both Apple and Microsoft were building in the early 90s. Second, it has the potential for improving productivity in collaborative workplace, remote, and hybrid environments. But it is a big change, and how its various capabilities will actually be adopted and integrated into systems and workflows within Microsoft 365, in conjunction with other workplace tools, and with larger enterprise ecosystems, is TBD. The Verge’s Tom Warren has more on the current announcements.
Apple’s privacy controls are mostly a good thing for consumers and for Apple, less so for publishers, advertisers, and competitors. Unfortunately, Apple’s new Private Relay seems to have the effect of treating the open web more as a direct competitor to be weakened than a sometimes inconvenient public good to be supported. For all its problems an open web is a net good for everyone. It is unlikely that Apple wants anyone to think they have to choose between Apple privacy and the open web. Eric Seufert explains why Apple’s new Private Relay, in its current form, is something to be concerned about.
This is not just for beginners. Prukalpa Sankar has put together a really useful curated list of resources for anyone who needs to keep up with current data stack technologies and strategies.
The modern data stack is messy and complicated, and it’s changing every day. There’s tons of news about it, and it’s hard to separate the hype and noise from reality. Here’s how our team keeps in touch with the latest news and trends.
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.
Following an early access program launched in March, expert.ai announced the general availability of its platform for designing, developing, testing, deploying and monitoring scalable natural language solutions. The expert.ai Platform uses an exclusive hybrid AI approach honed from hundreds of real-world implementations. Comprehensive and easy to use, it combines symbolic AI and machine learning techniques to ensure the best possible accuracy for each individual use case with transparency of explainable AI. Easy to deploy and operate, the cloud-based expert.ai Platform helps organizations accelerate, augment and expand expertise for any job or process that involves language. By turning any text-based document into structured data, the platform supports knowledge discovery, process automation and decision making with the flexibility to design language models for any use case.
With the release of the new text variants suggestions feature, Berlin-based AI company Retresco, an expert in Natural Language Generation, provides a software function that uses artificial intelligence to automatically produce phrasing suggestions in the form of complete sentences. This function automates the creative writing process, shortens it, and increases text variance without user intervention, augmenting human creativity with AI.
Retresco’s NLG software (textengine.io) independently suggests high-quality texts based on a sample sentence entered within milliseconds and without complicated setup by the user. The automatically generated texts can be adopted either partially or completely and be revised at any time. Human and machine thus work hand in hand: the software generates data-based text suggestions, while the human user ultimately decides how to use them. The result: significantly greater text variance, more efficient processes in the creation of texts, a better user experience, and support for the most difficult aspect of writing: creativity. This feature is particularly relevant in cases where large volumes of versatile, high-quality text are required at frequent intervals and often under time pressure. In e-commerce, for instance, online stores need numerous product descriptions that, above all, have to be highly varied and SEO-optimized.
To help brands build better digital experiences and establish greater digital trust with customers, Contentsquare, a provider of digital experience analytics, announced a an analytics solution that allows teams to access critical revenue insights without any use of cookies. This announcement comes on the heels of a recent $500M Series E round led by Softbank. Contentsquare has never relied on third-party cookies, and instead aggregates and analyzes trillions of consumer interactions that demonstrate intent, such as mouse movements, touch and mobile interactions, to help brands deliver the best possible experiences to their customers. The solution will now give businesses the option to turn off both first and third-party cookies. This latest innovation extends Contentsquare’s privacy-first approach.
Language I/O released its multilingual chatbot for Salesforce. Customers expect immediate responses from businesses when they are searching for help with an issue, and 64% of customers expect 24-hour customer service support to be available. The challenge comes in meeting those customers in their native language, so effective problem solving and direction is provided. In the US alone, approximately 13% (50 million people) of consumers are not native English speakers. Messages passed to chatbots, as with live chat, are often not written out in complete sentences with proper grammar. Customers are more conversational, the way people actually speak to each other in real life. The challenge of multilingual translation for chatbots, that Language I/O solves, is processing all the messy user generated content (UCG) including jargon, misspellings, acronyms, product names, etc.
This week I suggest articles by Walid Saba and Joshua Benton and have news from Google, TeamViewer and SAP, Amplitude, Jorsek, Asana, and SpeechLive. (<2 min)
You’ll note that I continue to experiment a bit with the format. After I try out a few more things I’ll follow up with the long-promised survey, especially given Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection. (See Joshua Benton’s article below.) In the meantime just reply to this email to let me know what you think.
Opinion / Analysis
Walid Saba
Ontology, knowledge graphs and NLU: three pillars of one and the same system
The application of enterprise knowledge graphs and natural language understanding and processing continue to grow, for good reason, but neither is easy and the combination even less so. In this short piece Walid Saba identifies a key problem yet argues that this combination, plus ontology is, in general, necessary for success. How to accomplish this? Well, he’s not the only one looking at this. The company he works for, Ontologik, is in stealth mode, but their site has links to an accessible presentation, and to more technical research.
Joshua Benton provides a good summary of last week’s announcements publishers big and small will care about. It’s a mixed bag, but changes to notification controls and the coming end of open rate statistics for newsletter publishers, like us, will not be pleased. The only thing we track is activity in our ad-free newsletter which provides important customer feedback.
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.
