Infosys announced a definitive agreement to acquire Blue Acorn iCi, Adobe Platinum partner in the US, focused on digital customer experience, commerce and analytics. Blue Acorn iCi brings to Infosys cross-technology capabilities through the convergence of customer experience, digital commerce, analytics, and experience driven commerce services. With services that include strategy, analytics, design, and engineering, Blue Acorn iCi serves global brands across industries from Media, Consumer Goods & Retail, to Financial Services, Manufacturing and Technology. Together with Infosys’ earlier acquisition of WONGDOODY that offers creative and marketing services, BlueAcorn iCi brings complimentary capabilities to help global CMOs and businesses thrive in a digital commerce world. This acquisition deepens Infosys’ capabilities in the Adobe, Magento, Salesforce Commerce and Shopify ecosystems. The acquisition is expected to close during the third quarter of fiscal 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.
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Vector Capital, a private equity firm, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MarkLogic Corporation, a provider of enterprise data integration and data management solutions. MarkLogic’s technology simplifies the integration of enterprise data across silos to provide. MarkLogic Data Hub Service is a managed cloud data platform that is able to assemble raw data, index it in real time for semantic search, and provide the ability to securely run operational and analytical applications. Over 2,500 customers including government agencies, financial services firms, insurance companies, manufacturing businesses, media companies, healthcare providers, and others utilize MarkLogic as a solution to simplify data integration. The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020.
https://www.marklogic.com, https://www.vectorcapital.com
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Syncro Soft, the developer of the Oxygen XML suite of products, announced the immediate availability of version 1.3 of Oxygen Feedback, including the new Enterprise edition. The Oxygen Feedback commenting platform provides an efficient way for your community to interact and offer feedback. Its modern, appearance is easy to configure and integrate, and it includes a user-friendly interface and numerous useful features for both Commenters and Administrators. It is specialized for technical documentation and can be easily integrated with Oxygen XML Editor/Author to make it more efficient for content authors to manage comments and react to community feedback. Features found in Oxygen Feedback version 1.3 include:
- The new Enterprise edition Platform Admin account provides access to a special administration area to view and manage all of the site configurations for your organization,
- offers the ability to enable and configure LDAP authentication.
- is compatible with the old Oxygen WebHelp PHP-based commenting system, which means that you can migrate your database without losing any information.
- A Dashboard page aggregates information about all of your existing site configurations and provides easier access to relevant parts of the interface,
- includes a site pane that you can use to visualize information about your site configurations, navigate to them for management purposes, and create new ones.
- has an activity stream pane that shows information about the most recent activities performed by members of your team or community.
- contains some statistics panes (such as statistics for page views and comments).
If you already own an Oxygen XML Editor, Oxygen XML Author, Oxygen XML Developer, Oxygen WebHelp, or Oxygen Publishing Engine license key, you are eligible to get a 50% discount off the Oxygen Feedback Enterprise edition for the first year of subscription. This promotion applies to every Oxygen Feedback Enterprise edition subscription plan and requests must be received by 31 December 2020. To see if you are eligible to obtain this discount, visit:
http://www.oxygenxml.com/oxygen_feedback_enterprise/special_offer.html
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AI democratization in the era of GPT-3
The recent announcement of Microsoft’s exclusive license to OpenAI’s GPT-3 says that in addition to using it for their own products, they will continue to work with OpenAI to help “democratize AI”. The GPT-3 code is not open source, but OpenAI provides free access to GPT-3 via an API, and says it will continue to do so. We’re left to speculate what this means beyond that. Will future models provide free access? Will they be exclusively licensed to Microsoft (an investor) or others? What does democratization in this context mean? Without making a value judgement about this, it’s clear that those building applications using GPT-3 API will have a lot of additional questions.
This article by Professor Mark Riedl from Georgia Institute of Technology is a great place to start.
Are you ready for quantum computing?
Quantum computing isn’t ready for prime time for practical business application yet, but it has lots of promise for industry use beyond encryption. Quantum computing is difficult for most of us to get our head around, nonetheless, senior executives and strategists need to track its progress and consider potential use cases. Fortunately, Professor of Physics and Computer Science, Shohini Ghose has provided a short and accessible general introduction, hype-free status update, and some good advice for business leaders.
The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a type of artificial intelligence that is at least as capable as human intelligence, is not a near-term reality. Ben Medlock agrees, and argues that humans have an unfair advantage in the scope and richness of our model, and that though we don’t know how, our bodies play a critical role in creating and maintaining our model.
This means that when a human approaches a new problem, most of the hard work has already been done. In ways that we’re only just beginning to understand, our body and brain, from the cellular level upwards, have already built a model of the world that we can apply almost instantly to a wide array of challenges. But for an AI algorithm, the process begins from scratch each time.
The weaponization of web archives: Data craft and COVID-19 publics
An enlightening academic look at provenance-hijacking tactics focused on current pandemic health misinformation.
Using provenance information such as original context, technical specificities, and unique characteristics of online resources from web crawls, and social analytics data from the Crowdtangle API we find that web archives like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine are being weaponized to propagate and preserve health misinformation circulating on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Also…
- ‘Digital chemistry’ breakthrough turns words into molecules Natch, there’s a Chemical Description Language (XDL) via phys.org
- Advice on coping with middle age… Google has outgrown its corporate culture via The Economist
- Yay! The resurgence and importance of email newsletters a survey via Reuters Institute
- If you’re tracking Web3 / decentralized web… An introduction to IPFS (Interplanetary File System) via Infura
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 do not sell or share personal data.
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O’Reilly announced the launch of O’Reilly Answers, an advanced natural language processing (NLP) engine that delivers quick, contextually relevant answers to challenging technical questions posed by users through O’Reilly online learning. With a one-click integration into Slack, O’Reilly Answers helps users learn from and discover content. Leveraging advanced machine learning techniques, the O’Reilly Answers search engine provides relevant highlights and snippets from O’Reilly’s library of expert content across thousands of O’Reilly’s titles, pointing users directly to only the most applicable resources. To encourage deeper discovery, the feature allows users to drill down into full content pieces from referenced titles. To further improve productivity, all functions of O’Reilly Answers are available through a simple Slack Integration.
https://www.oreilly.com/online-learning/
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Strapi announced enhancements to both its community and enterprise versions, adding features that simplify the user experience so that developers and content creators can be more productive. The new versions add publication workflow features, such as managing drafts and privileges, and introduces easy-to-get-started templates for many content-driven use cases. Strapi also added a “bronze plan” that provides access to its Role Based Access Control feature at a reduced subscription price. This plan is intended for startup to mid-market customers that are not seeking enterprise-level support services.
The Strapi CMS streamlines the delivery of content on any platform: websites, smartphones, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The Strapi CMS is customizable using application programming interfaces (APIs) and works with all the JAMstack static site generators and front-end frameworks (like Gatsby.js, Next.js, Nuxt.js, Angular, React, Vue.js). It provides support for both SQL and NoSQL databases and can be deployed anywhere: public or private cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean), Platform-as-a-Service (Heroku, Platform.sh, etc.) or on-premise servers. The community version is free open source software available for download. The Enterprise Edition is now available in three self-hosted paid plans.
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Lucid, provider of visual collaboration software, announced the expansion of its visual collaboration suite with the release of Lucidspark, a cloud-based virtual whiteboard where teams can work together in real time. Lucidspark helps teams to more effectively:
- Ideate: Capture and share ideas in a virtual whiteboard that provides the flexibility to maximize individual and team creativity. Lucidspark provides an infinite canvas to brainstorm, ideate, and work together.
- Create: Collaborate seamlessly and get everyone aligned. Teams can work together in real time or asynchronously and easily keep track of everyone’s contributions. Lucidspark also provides functionality to facilitate structured sessions, like allowing leaders to set the pace and clarify roles while participants can vote and react to help prioritize ideas.
- Act: Build shared consensus, align teams on priorities and transform ideas into next steps. Team members can automatically organize notes that highlight key results and illustrate actionable insights that can then be shared with leadership for approvals and buy-in. From there, teams can develop the agile workflows and game plans needed to build momentum and keep projects moving forward.
Lucidspark integrates with Lucid’s intelligent diagramming application, Lucidchart, making it possible to collaborate from initial idea through reality. For instance, once a team brainstorms details of a new application in Lucidspark, they can transition into Lucidchart to visualize the scrum teams, organizational processes and technical systems that will be necessary to make the application a reality.
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Netlify announced early access for Netlify Edge Handlers, enabling fast, personalized content in websites and web apps by executing custom code at the network edge. Edge Handlers bring edge compute into a single git-based Jamstack workflow, streamlining Continuous Delivery between frontend developers and DevOps and improving time to market. Now, with Edge Handlers, developers write simple JavaScript that builds and deploys to the network edge using Netlify, bringing together multiple complex work streams into a single workflow tied to a common git repository.
Developers can use Netlify’s platform to operate edge logic from preview to production, including build automation through git, atomic deploys to Netlify’s multi-cloud edge network, site previews and instant rollbacks. Content and traffic are adjusted locally, without a roundtrip to an origin server.
- Frontend workflow: Frontend developers use their favorite tools in the Netlify platform to build, preview and deploy, while maintaining full control over how their content is served to the end user.
- Simplified customization at the edge: The Edge Handlers API can fetch, cache and update content, allowing developers to deliver a personalized, better web experience for visitors with minimal development work.
- Monitor and log activity: Detailed logs for Edge Handlers can be managed and viewed from within the Netlify UI, making it easy to track usage and resolve issues quickly.
- Validate and test locally: Coming soon, Edge Handlers can be created on a local machine or with Netlify developer tools, used with any frontend framework to proxy requests and test before shipping.
Netlify Edge Handlers are in Early Access and available on request.
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