The Gilbane Advisor

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Atlassian to acquire The Browser Company

From the Atlassian blog… (Also see details from The Browser Company)

Building the AI browser for knowledge workers – a browser that helps you do, not just browse.

Today, I’m excited to share an exciting step forward for Atlassian. We’ve entered into an agreement to acquire The Browser Company of New York, the team behind the incredible Dia and Arc browsers.

By combining The Browser Company’s passion for building browsers people love with Atlassian’s deep expertise on how the world’s best teams operate, we have the opportunity to transform how work gets done in the AI era…

Today’s browsers weren’t built for work. They were built for browsing – reading the news, watching videos, looking up recipes. And sure, you may do some of those things in your browser during the workday, but most of those tabs represent a task that needs to get done. A meeting to schedule. A design to review. A work item to update in Jira. A memo to write. Before you know it, it’s hard to see through the forest of tabs.

Knowledge workers need a browser designed for their specific needs, not one that’s been built for everyone on the planet. That’s what we will build with The Browser Company. Our vision is to make Dia the browser:

  • Optimized for the SaaS apps where you spend your day. Whether you’re working in email or a project management tool or a design app, your tabs will be enriched with context that helps move your work forward.
  • Packed with AI skills and your personal work memory to connect the dots between your apps, tabs, and tasks.
  • Built with trust and security in mind Security, compliance, and admin controls will be baked into every aspect of Dia.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acquires-the-browser-companyhttps://browsercompany.substack.com/p/your-tuesday-in-2030

Neo4j launches Infinigraph

Neo4j, a graph database and analytics platform, unveiled Infinigraph: a new distributed graph architecture available in Neo4j’s self-managed offering. Infinigraph enables Neo4j’s database to run operational and analytical workloads together in a single system at 100TB+ scale, without fragmenting the graph, duplicating infrastructure, or compromising performance.

Teams can run both types of workloads in the same system, without ETL pipelines, sync delays, or redundant infrastructure. It can power autonomous agents, compliance systems, and transactional applications on one consistent source of connected truth. Teams can detect fraud and analyze fraud rings from the same dataset. They can generate real-time customer recommendations while analyzing decades of customer data and behavioral trends.

The database guarantees full ACID compliance so that every read, write, and update is consistent, reliable, and recoverable, even with billions of relationships and thousands of concurrent queries run in real time.

The new architecture uses sharding that distributes the graph’s property data across different members of a cluster. The graph stays logically whole, queries behave as expected, and applications scale without code changes or manual workarounds.

Infinigraph is available now as part of Neo4j’s Enterprise Edition and will soon be available in AuraDB, Neo4j’s cloud-native platform for graph applications.

https://neo4j.com/press-releases/neo4j-launches-infinigraph

Gilbane Advisor 7-30-25 — Neurosymbolic AI, on-device models, chat lies

This week we feature articles from Melanie Mitchell, Gary Marcus, and Cobus Greyling.

Additional reading comes from Michael Andrews, Robert Dennyson, Sainath Palla, and Eugene Yemelyanau & Jake Grice.

News comes from DeepL, Bloomreach & Snowflake, TileDB, and BrowserStack.

Reminder: We don’t usually publish in August. We’ll resume our regular schedule, such as it is, in September.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index


Opinion / Analysis

How o3 and Grok 4 accidentally vindicated Neurosymbolic AI

Gary Marcus …

“This essay explains what neurosymbolic AI is, why you should believe it, how deep learning advocates long fought against it, and how in 2025, OpenAI and xAI have accidentally vindicated it … And it is about why, in 2025, neurosymbolic AI has emerged as the team to beat.”

Those familiar with the long and often heated debates between advocates of neural network and symbol-manipulation approaches to AI may want to skip or scan the first half or so, but Marcus makes a good case for the combo. (19 min)

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-o3-and-grok-4-accidentally-vindicated

Apple foundation models — data sourcing & human oversight in building models

Cobus Greyling shares some rare encouraging news for Apple AI. In particular, Apple’s on-device model (AFM) at approximately 3 billion parameters (~3B), fares well in a benchmark comparison with similar on-device size models from Qwen and Google Gemma. (6 min)

https://cobusgreyling.medium.com/apple-foundation-models-data-sourcing-human-oversight-in-building-models-459de8e0cdcc

Why AI chatbots lie to us

Melanie Mitchell explains in plain language why we should not be surprised that AI chatbots are prone to deceive us, and why caution is called for. A good article for a broad audience. (8 min)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea3922

More Reading

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Content technology news

DeepL expands real-time voice translation capabilities

DeepL Voice updates include expanded language support and advanced meeting productivity features, with Zoom Meetings integration coming soon.
https://www.deepl.com/en/products/voice

Bloomreach and Snowflake partner

Connecting the Snowflake AI Data Cloud with Bloomreach’s Autonomous Marketing, businesses can centralize and activate data across marketing channels.
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-and-snowflake-partner-to-unify-customer-data-and-ai-driven-activation-helping-marketers-personalize-the-entire-customer-journey/

TileDB announces partnership with Databricks to harness multimodal data

The partnership provides for the integration of complex scientific data from TileDB, with Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and analytics workflows.
https://www.tiledb.com

BrowserStack launches Accessibility Design Toolkit

Figma plugin powered by BrowserStack’s Spectra Rule Engine, prevents up to 40% of accessibility issues before development even begins.
https://www.browserstack.com/accessibility-design-toolkit

All content technology news


The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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DeepL expands real-time voice translation capabilities

DeepL, a global Language AI company, announced several updates to its live speech translation solution, DeepL Voice, including expanded language support and advanced meeting productivity features, with Zoom Meetings integration coming soon.

DeepL Voice provides multilingual speech translation in real time, both virtually and in person. DeepL Voice for Meetings provides translated captions during virtual meetings, while DeepL Voice for Conversations offers instant speech translation on mobile for dynamic face-to-face interactions. Updates include:

  • Expanded language coverage: DeepL Voice now supports spoken input in three additional languages – Mandarin Chinese, Ukrainian, and Romanian – adding to its existing lineup (English, German, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Dutch, French, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Italian). Translated captions are available in 35 languages supported by DeepL Translator, with new additions Vietnamese and Hebrew.
  • Enhanced meeting productivity features: Full transcripts and translations from meetings to streamline notes, minutes and follow-up tasks can be downloaded with dedicated admin controls to maintain enterprise-level security and compliance.

DeepL Voice for Meetings will soon be available for Zoom Meetings, expanding beyond its existing Microsoft Teams integration to make multilingual communication accessible on the virtual meeting platform. For in-person interactions, DeepL Voice for Conversations continues to be available on iOS and Android.

https://www.deepl.com/en/products/voice

Bloomreach and Snowflake partner

Bloomreach, a platform for personalization, today announced a new partnership with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, empowering businesses to activate enterprise-grade data infrastructures across marketing channels. With Bloomreach and Snowflake, businesses can combine customer engagement with maximum personalization, connecting customer data stored in Snowflake with Bloomreach’s AI-powered marketing solutions. This partnership ensures marketers can activate their Snowflake data instantly and intelligently through Bloomreach.

Bloomreach’s native Snowflake integration is already available to businesses. It securely syncs customer attributes, event data, and product catalogs from Snowflake into Bloomreach. Businesses unlock the full value of their customer data, breaking down silos between storage and activation, and enabling personalization powered by AI.

Additionally, this integration enables marketing teams to:

  • Power Loomi AI agents in Bloomreach with enriched customer and product intelligence
  • Automate campaign triggers based on Snowflake events
  • Deliver timely personalization with fresh data and hyper-relevant insights
  • Safeguard sensitive data through selective import capabilities, transferring only the specific data required for a given use case

https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-and-snowflake-partner-to-unify-customer-data-and-ai-driven-activation-helping-marketers-personalize-the-entire-customer-journey/

BrowserStack launches Accessibility Design Toolkit

BrowserStack, a software testing platform, announced the launch of its Accessibility Design Toolkit, a Figma plugin that helps design teams build accessible products right from the design stage.

BrowserStack’s collaboration with WebAIM on the 2025 WebAIM Million report reveals the scope of the problem: 94.8% of one million analyzed homepages had at least one WCAG failure, with color contrast and missing alt text issues ranking among the top two—both preventable during design.

With over 8,800 ADA lawsuits filed in 2024 and the European Accessibility Act, teams are under pressure to meet standards, yet most still address these issues after launch, when fixes become harder and more expensive.

With BrowserStack’s Spectra Rule Engine, the Accessibility Design Toolkit helps shift accessibility left and enables design teams to:

  • Scan Figma design files for color contrast, touch target size, spacing issues, and more
  • Auto-detect UI components, validate against WCAG standards, and auto-annotate with ARIA roles
  • Get AI-powered suggestions to add alt text, fix heading structure, and improve keyboard focus order
  • Generate developer-ready handoffs with built-in accessibility specs and clear annotations

The Accessibility Design Toolkit is a part of BrowserStack’s all-in-one accessibility suite and is available to all Figma users, integrating into existing workflows.

https://www.browserstack.com/accessibility-design-toolkit

TileDB announces partnership with Databricks to harness multimodal data

TileDB, a multimodal database company, and Databricks, a Data and AI company, announced a strategic partnership to eliminate data silos preventing healthcare and life sciences organizations from fully leveraging AI-driven drug discovery and clinical insights.

The partnership addresses the challenge of integrating complex scientific data that TileDB supports, including multiomics, medical imaging, and clinical records with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Databricks’ analytics workflows — enabling the development of AI agents that can analyze all data types without requiring costly data migration or transformation.

TileDB addresses offers a sophisticated, omnimodal data management platform, which takes the notion of multimodality beyond text, video, audio, and images, and adds scientific modalities using multi-dimensional arrays. Scientific modalities are ever-evolving, and the omnimodal philosophy can support whatever is the most relevant and important data today. The TileDB – Databricks partnership establishes a bi-directional bridge between specialized data storage and powerful compute capabilities, underpinned by Databricks’ unified data governance model.

The integration is available now in private preview with select customers, and enables data stored in TileDB’s high-performance array database to run on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, and vice versa. Additional features will be rolled out in the second half of this year.

https://www.tiledb.com

Gilbane Advisor 7-9-25 — Unified Data Architecture KG, modern DBs

This week we feature articles from Alex Hutter, Alexandre Bertails, Claire Wang, Haoyuan He, Kishore Banala, Peter Royal & Shervin Afshar, and Max Ganz II.

Additional reading comes from José Parra-Moyano, Patrick Reinmoeller & Karl Schmedders, Paolo Perrone, Umesh Bhatt, and Jim Clyde Monge.

News comes from Cloudflare, Grammarly & Superhuman, Syncro Soft, and RWS & Papercut.

Our summer schedule is quickly approaching. There will be one additional newsletter in July, and we’ll resume our regular schedule, such as it is, in September.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index


Opinion / Analysis

Model once, represent everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix

A team from Netflix generously describes how they are tackling their data integration challenges. The case study addresses issues that stymie many modern data management efforts. It is a bit technical, but easily worth the effort.

“This post introduces the foundations of UDA as a knowledge graph, connecting domain models to data containers through mappings, and grounded in an in-house metamodel, or model of models, called Upper. Upper defines the language for domain modeling in UDA and enables projections that automatically generate schemas and pipelines across systems.” (15 min)

https://netflixtechblog.com/uda-unified-data-architecture-6a6aee261d8d

The different flavors modern databases come in

The actual title of the paper is Introduction to the fundamentals of Amazon Redshift, by Max Ganz. I chose the title above because even if you have no interest in Redshift, you’ll likely want to read this piece. As Tim Bray says, it “has one of the best explanations I’ve ever read of the different flavors modern databases come in”. Long but easy read. (44 min)

https://www.redshift-observatory.ch/white_papers/downloads/introduction_to_the_fundamentals_of_amazon_redshift.html

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues


Content technology news

Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers accessing content by default

Websites choose if they want AI crawlers to access their content, and decide how AI companies can use it – AI companies can state their crawlers purpose.
https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2025/cloudflare-just-changed-how-ai-crawlers-scrape-the-internet-at-large/

Syncro Soft releases Oxygen AI Positron Assistant 6.0

The Oxygen AI Positron Service brings model updates, subscription management for teams, allowing centralized purchase or renewal, and requires AI Positron add-ons version 4 or newer.
https://www.oxygenxml.com/ai_positron/whats_new.html

Grammarly to acquire Superhuman

The acquisition accelerates Grammarly’s evolution into an AI productivity platform for apps and agents, positioning email as a critical communication surface.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-to-acquire-superhuman/https://superhuman.com

RWS acquires Papercup’s IP

Papercup’s technology combines voice synthesis, unique AI voices and editorial tools for human language specialists to fine-tune the output.
https://www.rws.com/about/news/2025/rws-acquires-papercups-ip/https://www.papercup.com

All content technology news


The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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

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