Day: December 1, 2021

Optimizely to acquire Welcome

December 1, 2021 / NewsShark

Digital experience platform (DXP) provider, Optimizely, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Welcome, who brings capabilities of content marketing platforms (CMP), marketing resource management (MRM) and digital asset management (DAM) together in a single solution. The combined company will help marketing teams at brands across the globe to achieve business value through better customer experiences. The complexity and fragmentation of the marketing stack compromises marketers’ ability to deliver personalized, contextual experiences and create relevant content. Welcome’s capabilities combined with Optimizely’s solutions for commerce and content management – as well as its tools for experimentation, personalization and recommendations – means marketers can now:

Accelerate the end-to-end marketing lifecycle from concept to execution
Gain control and transparency to manage content
Grow revenue by scaling adoption of optimization.

The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 of 2021. Until such closing, the companies will continue to operate independently, with Welcome’s core marketing orchestration and asset management capabilities operating standalone.

https://www.optimizely.com/welcome/

Microsoft introduces Teams Essentials

December 1, 2021 / NewsShark

Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability of Teams Essentials, the first-ever standalone Microsoft Teams offering, designed specifically for small businesses. Teams Essentials gives small businesses a professional and affordable meetings solution to support collaboration, connection and productivity in a hybrid work environment. Teams Essentials is competitively priced at $4 USD per person per month. Teams Essentials provides:

Unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours
Meetings with up to 300 people
10 GB of cloud storage per user

Teams Essentials also includes existing and new capabilities available in the free version of Teams:

Simple, easy invitations require only an email address. Users are not required to sign up, sign in or install Teams to participate in a meeting.
In addition to Outlook Calendar integration, new Google Calendar integration is coming soon.
Professional meeting tools and capabilities like meeting lobby, virtual backgrounds, Together mode, live closed captions and live reactions.
Never lose context or continuity with always-available chats in Microsoft Teams.
Quickly start a group project and host meetings with anyone, assign tasks to teammates, and create polls to receive feedback quickly all in one hub with the new small-business group chat template coming soon to desktop and web.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/compare-microsoft-teams-options

Gilbane Advisor 12-1-21 — blockchain, performance + brand

December 1, 2021 / Frank Gilbane

This week we have articles from Viet Nguyen, and Eric Benjamin Seufert. News comes from Marklogic and Smartlogic, Jina AI, Meltwater and DeepReason.AI, and Strapi.

Opinion / Analysis

Blockchain explained in 50 lines of code

Don’t skip over this article if you’re not a programmer, or because you already understand how blockchains work. Software developer Viet Nguyen delivers on the title with a delightfully clear and simple explanation in both English and JavaScript. If you already understand blockchains, you may pick up some pointers for explaining it to others.

https://medium.com/geekculture/blockchain-explained-in-50-lines-of-code-1dbf4eda0201

The perilous mythology of brand marketing for digital products

…the misconception that Brand marketing sits in opposition to Performance marketing creates misalignment and confusion that can result in a Brand function that exists in parallel to a Performance marketing team. Optimally, the Brand function should sit within the Performance Marketing team and be guided by a unified measurement model.

Eric Benjamin Seufert provides a helpful framework for pulling together competing marketing strategies and tactics.

https://mobiledevmemo.com/understanding-the-role-of-brand-marketing-for-digital-products/

Content technology news

MarkLogic acquires metadata management provider Smartlogic

Smartlogic has deciphered, filtered, and connected data for global organizations to help solve their complex data problems.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/marklogic-acquires-metadata-management-provider-smartlogic/

Strapi CMS v4 released

The open-source “headless” content management system CMS update enhances overall performance, introduces new query engine and plug-in APIs.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/strapi-cms-v4-released/

Meltwater acquires DeepReason.ai

To help build one of the largest knowledge graphs of public information. The technology represents 75 years of aggregate research in Graph Reasoning.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/meltwater-acquires-deepreason-ai/

Jina AI raises $30 million to scale open-source neural search ecosystem

Jina AI’s core project, built in the open on GitHub, users can quickly create a cloud-native neural search solution with deep learning.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/jina-ai-raises-30-million-to-scale-open-source-neural-search-ecosystem/

All content technology news

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.