TransPerfect, provider of language and technology solutions for global business, announced that it has acquired Webcertain Group Ltd., a specialized international digital marketing agency. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Founded in 2003 by Andy Atkins-Krüger in York, England, Webcertain has grown to over 100 employees in its York and Barcelona offices. The agency provides international digital marketing services, covering SEO, SEM, social media, and content services primarily focused on the B2B sector. Clients include technology companies such as Akamai, global manufacturers like Fellowes, and travel industry leaders such as NH Hotels.
Webcertain will complement TransPerfect’s TPT Digital division, joining together two digital agencies who share a common focus on targeted campaigns that go beyond language translation. Webcertain is also known for its community building within the digital marketing world. Its International Search Summit series is a program for digital marketers that comprises four events annually across Europe and the US. TransPerfect was advised on the transaction by Simons Muirhead Burton. Webcertain was represented by Consulting M&A and Wallace LLP.
Adobe announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Frame.io, a cloud-based video collaboration platform. Frame.io streamlines the video production process by enabling video editors and key project stakeholders to collaborate using cloud-first workflows. The combination of Adobe’s creative software, including Premiere Pro and After Effects video editing products, and Frame.io’s review and approval functionality, will deliver a collaboration platform that powers the video editing process.
Video teams must produce an ever-increasing volume of content, and each video project requires various stakeholders, including video editors, producers, agencies, and clients. Today’s video workflows are disjointed with multiple tools and communication channels being used to solicit stakeholder feedback. Frame.io eliminates the inefficiencies of video workflows by enabling real-time footage upload, access, and in-line stakeholder collaboration in a secure and elegant experience across surfaces.
Frame.io co-founder and CEO Emery Wells and co-founder John Traver will join Adobe. Wells will continue to lead the Frame.io team, reporting to Scott Belsky. The transaction, valued at $1.275 billion, subject to customary purchase price adjustments, is expected to close during the fourth quarter of Adobe’s 2021 fiscal year and is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. Until the transaction closes, each company will continue to operate independently.
This week we have articles from Paco Nathan (@pacoid)and Kabir Nagrecha (@KabirNagrecha). News comes from Bloomreach, MarkLogic, Acquia, OpenAI, and Moonwalk Universal and IBM.
Opinion / Analysis
The last, and often the most difficult and costly, step before a promising but complex enterprise technologies becomes mainstream is for organizations to figure out how to operationalize them. Knowledge graphs and machine learning are two such technologies at this stage. How do they fit in with existing software, systems, processes, and resources? What has to change, what will it cost, and how long will it take?
Big questions, but both articles this week should be useful when you’re thinking about strategies. First, Kabir Nagrecha discusses how existing systems research and practices contribute to machine learning operations (MLOps). Next, Paco Nathan looks at ways to think about knowledge graphs in the context of systems thinking and complex problem solving.
Systems for Machine Learning
On the field of Machine Learning Systems and how it addresses the new challenges of ML with a lens shaped by traditional systems research.
ML system architecture from D. Sculley’s “Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems”. Note the relative importance of data management versus ML code.
Graph Thinking
A kind of cognitive framework called graph thinking is circulating through the KGC community. Let’s explore this notion.
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.
MURAL, a provider of digital workspaces for guided visual collaboration in the enterprise, has launched a new MURAL Free plan so teams everywhere can collaborate visually without any time limits. The new plan offers a free forever digital workspace that includes five murals, unlimited members, and all of MURAL’s Facilitation Superpowers features. The free plan offers teams a chance to turn traditional, nonproductive meetings into engaging, inclusive opportunities for ideation and co-creation through guided visual collaboration.
This includes timers to keep meetings on schedule, voting sessions to speed up decision-making, summoning participants to direct attention, private mode to enable more inclusive ideation, and celebrations. Visitors can collaborate in any mural simply by sharing a link. The Free plan also includes access to over 250 templates for team activities like brainstorming, product roadmaps, OKR planning, Agile ceremonies, user journey maps, team building, icebreakers, and more. Free memberships include access to MURAL’s deep expertise in visual thinking, including resources like MURAL Learning and MURAL Community.
The Free plan joins a new plans from MURAL, including the Team+ plan that allows for frequent collaboration with unlimited murals, the Business plan that provides increased security and expert onboarding, and the full-featured Enterprise plan.
Confluent, Inc. announced the Confluent Q3 ʼ21 Release, with features that help organizations share data between different environments, integrate with business-critical applications, and store data for digital customer experiences and data-driven backend operations.
As a part of the Q3 ʼ21 Release, ksqlDB pull queries are now generally available in Confluent Cloud. Together with push queries, ksqlDB enables a broad class of end-to-end stream processing workloads without the need to work across multiple systems to build streaming applications.
Confluent has expanded its library of managed Kafka. The Salesforce Platform Events Source connector enables organizations to unlock customer data and share it with downstream data warehouses and applications. The Azure Cosmos DB Sink connector helps companies migrate to a modern, cloud-native database to enable high performance and automatic scaling, unlocking real-time use cases.
Confluent re-architected Kafka to work in the cloud. Infinite Storage is now generally available for Google Cloud, after initially launching for AWS. Organizations can now retain all the real-time and historical data they need without pre-provisioning additional infrastructure or running the risk of paying for unused storage.
Content management system (CMS) supplier Umbraco is expanding worldwide with operational and financial backing from Swedish software growth investor Monterro. Announced by both companies, Monterro now owns a majority stake in the Danish open-source CMS vendor. Umbraco CEO Kim Sneum Madsen will continue in his leadership role, while founder Niels Hartvig will leave the company to pursue other opportunities.
Founded in 2005, Umbraco offers platforms that include the open-source Umbraco CMS; Umbraco Heartcore, a headless CMS; Umbraco Cloud; and Umbraco Uno, a one-stop platform for non-technical marketers and creative agencies.
As part of its mission to turn Nordic software companies into global market leaders, Monterro has completed 17 investments and 17 add-on investments since 2012. These include operational experience from successfully developing and running companies such as Pointsec, Orc Software, and CMS vendor EPiServer, now Optimizely. Monterro CEO Gustav Lagercrantz said Umbraco’s strong open-source model with an extensive community, as well as Monterro’s positive previous experience with the CMS industry, made Umbraco a highly attractive investment.
Moonwalk Universal, a specialist in large-scale data management solutions, announced Moonwalk version 12.12 provides enhanced metadata and content inspection capabilities to streamline AI workflows and integrate heterogenous data environments for IBM Spectrum Discover.
IBM Spectrum Discover is an advanced data cataloging and metadata management system that provides content insight for exabyte-scale unstructured data. IBM Spectrum Discover and Moonwalk connect to multiple file and object storage systems on-premises and in the cloud. The solution has been designed to rapidly ingest, consolidate and index metadata for billions of files and objects, providing a unified metadata layer on top of heterogenous storage environments. A unified metadata layer with custom and automated tagging, enables data scientists, storage administrators, and data stewards to manage, classify and gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data. The insights gained accelerate large-scale analytics, improve storage economics, and help with risk mitigation to create competitive advantage and speed research.
Moonwalk’s latest update also includes integration and support for the latest file systems and servers, cloud and object stores, including Windows Server 2019, NetApp and Isilon, IBM Cloud Object Store, RStor, Wasabi, Amazon S3, Azure, Google Cloud, Hitachi HCP, Dell EMC ECS, Scality RING, Caringo Swarm and Cloudian HyperStore.
Bloomreach announced it has launched Automatic Query Filtering (AQF), a new product feature within its AI-powered search and merchandising module, Bloomreach Discovery. In an e-commerce site’s typical product search, results are often imprecise (though still relevant) by design in order to give customers the opportunity to explore products they would not otherwise see. When a merchandising team needs to take a different approach and apply precision for specific business goals, they can now use AQF.
AQF helps businesses cut through noisy search results that are generated when customers search for products with specific attributes such as color, size, or brand. It allows merchandisers to pre-filter products on the results page based on these attributes, delivering more precise search results and shortening the time it takes for shoppers to find the product they want.
Utilizing AQF, a retail company could ensure searches for a red dress, for example, only result in red dresses — without the shopper needing to pick “red” from an additional selection of filters. An automotive company would be able to ensure a search for “2015 Toyota Corolla brake pads” only offers customers results that match each of those attributes.
