I hope you’ve all had safe and pleasant holidays so far this season, and that those to come are equally happy. This will be the last issue of 2021. Our next issue will arrive January 5th, though it’s possible we’ll publish a few news items on our blog in the meantime.

This week we have content from Cassie Kozyrkov, and Scott Brinker. News comes from Adobe, MACH Alliance and Netlify and MongoDB, SnapLogic, Datadobi, and Datawords and Contentful.

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Opinion / Analysis

Data, decisioning, delivery & design: A framing for the CDP vs. CDW debate

Competing and overlapping data management approaches and products complicate vertical and horizontal stack decisions, not to mention operational data control / influence, process, and budget changes. The customer data platform versus cloud data warehouse debate is especially relevant to martech stacks, but as Scott Brinker points out, also important to other domain-specific stacks. Scott zooms out and provides some really useful ways to think about the problem generally, and how to approach it.

https://chiefmartec.com/2021/12/data-decisioning-delivery-design-a-framing-for-the-cdp-vs-cdw-debate/

Making friends with machine learning

This is the title of an internal full-day course created for Google employees, both technical and non-technical, recently made freely available to all. I have watched the first of the four sections and the content and delivery were spectacular. I’m looking forward to watching the rest over the holidays. Presenter Cassie Kozyrkov…

The course is designed to give you the tools you need for effective participation in machine learning for solving business problems and for being a good citizen in an increasingly AI-fueled world. MFML is perfect for all humans; it focuses on conceptual understanding (rather than the mathematical and programming details) and guides you through the ideas that form the basis of successful approaches to machine learning. It has something for everyone!

https://kozyrkov.medium.com/the-best-ai-course-youve-ever-watched-c15e0a0bbb0a

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Content technology news

Adobe introduces Creative Cloud Express

A unified task-based, web and mobile product to make it easy to create and share rich multimedia content; free to start and available to all now.
https://gilbane.com/2021/12/adobe-introduces-creative-cloud-express/

MACH Alliance announces MongoDB and Netlify as members

New membership category applies to organizations that enable MACH providers to deliver a service or technology but don’t offer a direct MACH solution.
https://gilbane.com/2021/12/mach-alliance-announces-mongodb-and-netlify-as-members/

SnapLogic updates Intelligent Integration Platform

Improvements include self-service for API consumers, enhanced support for data warehouse tools, and added features for SnapLogic Flows.
https://gilbane.com/2021/12/snaplogic-updates-intelligent-integration-platform/

Datadobi launches multi-petabyte Starter Packs

The offering is purpose-built to bolster unstructured data management projects’ success in data-heavy, high-volume environments.
https://gilbane.com/2021/12/datadobi-launches-multi-petabyte-starter-packs/

Datawords partners with Contentful

To help in-house digital teams combine technology integration and cultural expertise to facilitate the work for global customers.
https://gilbane.com/2021/12/datawords-partners-with-contentful/

All content technology news

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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.

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This week we have articles from Erik Bernhardsson, and Roger Martin. News comes from RWS / Tridion, Optimizely and Welcome, MongoDB, eccenca, and Quantinuum.

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Opinion / Analysis

Singing the data analytics blues

It just ain’t what it is cracked up to be… I get a seemingly endless flow of complaints about Data Analytics (DA for short), even though it is the hottest thing in business these days. Why isn’t DA giving me the insights that it is supposed to provide? We have a DA team now, but the little startups keep figuring stuff out before us and beating us?

Roger Martin has essential reminders for some of us, and a handy short piece for all to share with colleagues who are asking questions like these.

https://rogermartin.medium.com/singing-the-data-analytics-blues-58fdf93b27bf

How the cloud will be reshuffled

Though cloud computing is not at all new, is a large and growing market, and is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, how it will evolve is unclear. Just as cloud computing makes it possible for startups to jump start, and enterprises to slash some infrastructure costs, it adds cost and complexity to software engineering, and adds future lock-in and data integration and repatriation risks. In addition, while the big three will likely remain entrenched at the lowest level of the computing stack, we don’t know who will share the other layers, or how they will overlap. Erik Bernhardsson has a theory worth checking out, and includes link to his critics.

https://erikbern.com/2021/11/30/storm-in-the-stratosphere-how-the-cloud-will-be-reshuffled.html

More reading…

• Useful summary… Radar trends to watch: December 2021 via O’Reilly Radar
• Not a must-have, maybe a nice-to-have for some… Second Life creator has doubts about the metaverse via Axios
• Slides from this year’s presentation… Three steps to the future via Benedict Evans

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Content technology news

eccenca updates multi-graph platform

New eccenca Corporate Memory multi-graph platform release focused on making knowledge graph technology accessible to business users with no-code.
https://gilbane.com/2021/12/eccenca-updates-multi-graph-platform/

RWS embeds semantic AI capabilities in Tridion

To help companies create, manage, and deliver intuitive multilingual content and digital experiences to customers, employees and partners across channels.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/rws-embeds-semantic-ai-capabilities-in-tridion/

Optimizely to acquire Welcome

Will combine content management, commerce, content marketing, marketing resource management and digital asset management in a single solution.
https://gilbane.com/2021/12/optimizely-to-acquire-welcome/

MongoDB announces pay-as-you-go offering in AWS Marketplace

The new pay-as-you-go option is another way to procure MongoDB in addition to privately negotiated offers already supported on AWS Marketplace.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/mongodb-announces-pay-as-you-go-offering-in-aws-marketplace/

Cambridge Quantum and Honeywell Quantum Solutions merge into Quantinuum

Quantinuum includes Cambridge Quantum software, operating systems, and cybersecurity, and Honeywell Quantum Solutions hardware.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/cambridge-quantum-and-honeywell-quantum-solutions-merge-into-quantinuum/

All content technology news

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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.

Subscribe | Feed | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

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.

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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/

More reading…

• Truth to power and the naive… 4 changes the AI industry needs right now via Alberto Romero
• Ben Thompson… Twitter has a new CEO; what about a new business model? via Stratechery
• From directional to logical properties in CSS… Faulty logic via Adactio
• Interesting book review: A Biography of a Pixel via Technology Review

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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

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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.

Subscribe | Feed | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

We’re publishing a day early this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S. While the holiday is on Thursday, a large part of the population checks out tomorrow.

This week we have articles from Siobhan Roberts and James Governor. News comes from Netlify and OneGraph, Snowflake, Datadobi, and Databricks.

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Opinion / Analysis

An E. coli biocomputer solves a maze by sharing the work

E. coli thrives in our guts, sometimes to unfortunate effect, and it facilitates scientific advances—in DNA, biofuels, and Pfizer’s covid vaccine, to name but a few. Now this multitalented bacterium has a new trick: it can solve a classic computational maze problem using distributed computing—dividing up the necessary calculations among different types of genetically engineered cells.

Siobhan Roberts reports on how this promising and fascinating feat of synthetic biology was accomplished.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/09/1039107/e-coli-maze-solving-biocomputer/

The great smooshing: fragmentation and not fragmentation in technology infrastructure

Of course there is bundling and unbundling, but that is just one piece of the larger, more complex, and eternal software opera. James Governor explains and demonstrates the smooshing etc., and describes the current state of the cycle.

https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2021/11/15/the-great-smooshing-fragmentation-and-not-fragmentation-in-technology-infrastructure/

More reading…

• Great way to think about it… Digital privacy is now an unstoppable “Three Body Problem” via Mobile Dev Memo
• Excellent case study. (yes, it’s Zillow)… A $9B AI fail via Gianluca Mauro
• Learning how AlphaZero learned?… ♟♟ Chess learning explainability via TheSequence

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Content technology news

Netlify acquires OneGraph GraphQL platform

OneGraph will drive innovation in the Netlify platform to make it easier to build and manage integrations across third-party services and access internal services and data.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/netlify-acquires-onegraph-graphql-platform/

Snowflake announces Python support and more

To help organizations operate across clouds and regions & data engineering and data science teams build pipelines, ML workflows, and applications faster.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/snowflake-announces-python-support-and-more/

Datadobi introduces DobiMigrate API

DobiMigrate Version 5.13’s new API will allow organizations to programmatically configure unstructured data migrations using the API.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/datadobi-introduces-dobimigrate-api/

Databricks launches Partner Connect

To make it easier for customers to discover and connect popular data, analytics, and AI tools to their lakehouse, and deliver native product integrations.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/databricks-launches-partner-connect/

All content technology news

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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.

Subscribe | Feed | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we have articles from Christine Vallaure and Simon Yuen. News comes from The Enterprise Knowledge Graph Foundation (EKGF), BA Insight, MediaValet and FFW, Kyndryl and Microsoft, and Lucid.

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Opinion / Analysis

An era of digital humans

The process to create a digital human is extremely labor-intensive and manual. NVIDIA is researching tools and developing ways to accelerate and simplify digital human creation — and we believe AI and simulation is the key to doing this.

Simon Yuen leads NVIDIA’s Digital Human efforts and explains what they are doing to make digital humans more realistic and useful for a wide range of applications. There are also a couple of fascinating short videos.

https://medium.com/@nvidiaomniverse/an-era-of-digital-humans-bfa10d41e289

Why designers should move from px to rem — and how to do that in Figma

If you are anything like me, you happily used Pixel (px) in Sketch and Figma during the past years without thinking much about it. It is the unit they gave me. Surely it is correct, and if not, the development team can fix that, no? Plus, there are a lot of people saying my design should be pixel perfect, right?

Christine Vallaure points out that designing only with pixels conflicts with accessibility requirements, and then provides a deep dive on why, and what can be done about it. She is writing for other designers, and developers, but the article will be illuminating for anyone interested in web design and/or accessibility.

https://uxdesign.cc/why-designers-should-move-from-px-to-rem-and-how-to-do-that-in-figma-c0ea23e07a15

More reading…

• So simple it doesn’t even look like AR at first, but effective… Walmart’s augmented reality app is perfectly low-key via Debugger
• Not at all simple. Impressive… Light Field Lab’s new naked-eye holograms via Charlie Fink. Demos at https://www.lightfieldlab.com
• Mining all those PDFs, including for entities… Natural language processing, Adobe PDF Extract, and deep PDF intelligence, via Adobe Tech Blog
• Great idea. Normalizing datasets and UI… Hugging Face Introduces ‘Datasets’: A Lightweight Community Library For Natural Language Processing (NLP) via Martech Post

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Content technology news

Enterprise Knowledge Graph Foundation (EKGF) releases draft maturity model

The open source EKG/MM is a collaboration of experts and practitioners designed to promote best practices across the knowledge graph community.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/enterprise-knowledge-graph-foundation-ekgf-releases-draft-maturity-model/

BA Insight for Amazon OpenSearch Service and BA Insight for Amazon Kendra now in AWS Marketplace

Offerings provide customers the ability to easily subscribe to the BA Insight technology stack directly through their existing AWS accounts.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/ba-insight-for-amazon-opensearch-service-and-ba-insight-for-amazon-kendra-now-in-aws-marketplace/

MediaValet partners with FFW

FFW customers will be able to aggregate, secure, organize and access their digital assets as their organizations grow.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/mediavalet-partners-with-ffw/

Kyndryl and Microsoft establish global strategic partnership

To accelerate digital transformation across industries built on the Microsoft Cloud to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption, modernize applications and processes.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/kyndryl-and-microsoft-establish-global-strategic-partnership/

Lucid updates Lucidspark integration with Teams

The new integration feature allows users to collaborate and interact with a Lucidspark board directly within a Teams meeting, sharing it to the meeting stage.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/lucid-updates-lucidspark-integration-with-teams/

All content technology news

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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.

Subscribe | Feed | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we have articles from Scott Brinker, and Benedict Evans. News comes from Contentful and Vaimo, Liferay, Bridgeline and Luminos, and Microsoft.

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Opinion / Analysis

Commerce is the latest (renewed) frontier in martech

Scott Brinker has a short post about how important digital commerce has become in martech stack near-term budget planning. As the chart above shows, digital commerce tools are at the top of the list at 43%. “The second most anticipated addition by 34% of respondents? Digital experience platforms (DXP), which, frankly, are often the engines through which commerce-related content and experiences are deployed.”. Note the chart also shows content management systems (CMS), largely the same vendors as DXPs, as the fourth choice at 25%. Content and digital commerce have a long history predating the dot-com crash, but the difficulty of integrating the necessary systems and organizations has held back progress. Scott also shares a Gartner chart showing a big jump coming in B2B procurement through websites. Looks like content and commerce have a big future in martech land.

https://chiefmartec.com/2021/10/commerce-is-the-latest-renewed-frontier-in-martech/

Metabrand

The most popular link from last week’s issue was Ethan Zuckerman’s article on Facebook’s metamove, largely about the technical challenges of metaverses. Benedict Evans is no less skeptical, but because of the history of such large company reinventions.

… it seems to me that the real rebrand this week wasn’t Facebook to Meta but VR to Metaverse. VR is an old and pretty stale term – a dad brand – and Facebook wants to make VR into much more than just a headset and some games. It’s trying to make that happen through sheer weight of investment, effort and organisational mass – Moore’s law plus money and momentum will pull this into existence out of thin air (it hopes). Rebranding, reconceptualising, and relaunching might be part of that. The trouble is…

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/11/7/metabrand

More reading…

• The initiative is not new but the tool is… Adobe and news orgs are working on a new tool that could identify a photo’s origin — and combat misinformation via NiemanLab
• Caught… Clearview finally submits AI for independent testing; only tests feature it isn’t actually selling via Techdirt
• Ouch… AMP has irreparably damaged publishers’ trust in Google-led initiatives via WP Tavern
• Toward speech recognition for uncommon spoken languages via MIT

All Gilbane Advisor issues

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Content technology news

Vaimo partners with Contentful

B2B and B2C merchants need flexibility from their digital technology stack. With Contentful’s platform Vaimo can provide a headless or suite approach to digital solutions.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/vaimo-partners-with-contentful/

Liferay unveils DXP 7.4

Liferay’s digital experience platform DXP 7.4 delivers new capabilities that allow all users to deliver and optimize digital experiences.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/liferay-unveils-dxp-7-4/

Microsoft introduces Microsoft Loop

A new app that combines a flexible canvas with portable Fluid components that move freely and stay in sync across apps for team collaboration.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/microsoft-introduces-microsoft-loop/

Bridgeline and Luminos Labs to productize Hawksearch connector for Optimizely

The Optimizely B2C connector is already used by B2C platform customers and adds to integrations with Salesforce B2B Commerce, Big Commerce, Magento.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/bridgeline-and-luminos-labs-to-productize-hawksearch-connector-for-optimizely/

Microsoft unveils Mesh for Microsoft Teams

Mesh builds on Teams features such as Together mode and Presenter mode that make remote and hybrid meetings more collaborative and immersive.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/microsoft-unveils-mesh-for-microsoft-teams/

All content technology news

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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.

Subscribe | Feed | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

This week we have articles from Francois Brill, and Ethan Zuckerman. News comes from Neeva and NewsGuard, Acquia, Adobe, Franz, and Progress.

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Opinion / Analysis

The start of a new era for responsive web design

In today’s terms, when we say Responsive Design, we think of a page that adapts its layout to the overall browser, screen size and the limitations projected onto the entire layout. We use media queries to change the whole page layout as we resize the design from a desktop to a mobile size… Very soon, using this approach to Responsive Design, might be considered as outdated as using tables for page layout — like we did in the ’90s.

Francois Brill explains why it’s time to start planning for the user experience improvements possible with new capabilities coming to CSS, such as user-preference queries, container styles, and container queries. These will take responsive design to a new level. While not ready for prime time, designers can see and experiment with current versions of these.

https://uxdesign.cc/the-start-of-a-new-era-for-responsive-web-design-6658a6bbeb9b

The metaverse was lame even before Facebook

“It was terrible then, and it’s terrible now.” Ethan Zuckerman is far from the only critic of Facebook’s metaverse pivot but his critique may be the most comprehensive and enjoyable read. There is more metaverse history than you think and the technology is still harder and further away than most realize.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/10/facebook-metaverse-was-always-terrible/620546/

More reading…

• API indexing explained… IndexNow and the future of web crawling via Kevin Indig
• Cowriting an album with AI… Why a neural net is like ‘a chain of guitar pedals’ via Clive Thompson
• Hmmm… How to manipulate customers… ethically via HBR

All Gilbane Advisor issues

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Content technology news

Neeva and NewsGuard team up for independent assessments of news sources in search

Neeva’s search engine will deliver NewsGuard’s labels – credible and transparent news assessments in search results.
https://gilbane.com/2021/11/neeva-and-newsguard-team-up-for-independent-assessments-of-news-sources-in-search/

Acquia builds out Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Drupal Cloud and Marketing Cloud updates make it easier to launch new websites, applications and marketing campaigns with modular components.
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/acquia-builds-out-digital-experience-platform-dxp/

Adobe announced the next generation of Creative Cloud

Updates across Creative Cloud apps, addition of Frame.io and advanced 3D and immersive authoring abilities, collaboration capabilities, more.
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/adobe-announced-the-next-generation-of-creative-cloud/

Franz releases AllegroGraph 7.2

Provides Data Fabric tools, including Graph Neural Networks, Graph Virtualization, Apache Spark graph analytics & streaming graph pipelines.
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/franz-releases-allegrograph-7-2/

Progress releases MOVEit 2021.1

With improved levels of, resilience, scalability, usability and support for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance.
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/progress-releases-moveit-2021-1/

All content technology news

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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.

Subscribe | Feed | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact