Lighthouse, a provider of technology-enabled ediscovery, compliance and information governance services, announced it will acquire H5, a provider of sensitive data classification, analytics and ediscovery solutions for complex litigation and regulatory compliance challenges.
This transaction marks Lighthouse’s first entry into the document review space with the addition of advanced search and analytics technology, and experts focused on helping clients find and classify sensitive data and automate key review workflows with unparalleled speed and accuracy. With H5, Lighthouse is acquiring review efficiency technology that enables its consultants to accurately and efficiently perform key document identification and responsiveness review faster than manual review teams. This solution is currently being used by many of the world’s leading corporations and law firms and applies broadly to all document review. Lighthouse will now offer a comprehensive set of consulting, review, ediscovery and information governance technologies and services that spans the entire client data lifecycle and fully embraces the rapid shifts to cloud and hybrid environments.
Monotype announced the launch of iType 6.0, a new version of its product for embedded solutions. Monotype’s iType font engine is a scalable font rendering subsystem based on industry standard TrueType and OpenType font standards. Designed to work in resource-constrained embedded environments, the iType font engine brings the benefits of scalable type and high-quality multilingual font display to Automotive and other consumer electronics manufacturers worldwide.
Version 6.0 of the iType font engine is designed to add support for OpenType Font Variations, commonly known as variable fonts. OpenType Font Variations allow a font designer to incorporate multiple typefaces within a font family into a single font resource. This reduces the code size and memory requirement which is of utmost importance in embedded environments. iType 6.0 supports both mandatory tables (fvar and gvar) along with other optional tables such as avar, cvar, hvar, and mvar. Other new features include:
Sensory Inc. announced the integration of its TrulyNatural embedded speech recognition software within the latest public beta release of Zoom Rooms for Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows. Powered by Sensory, voice commands are now supported on all Zoom Rooms platforms. With this update, Zoom-native voice commands support expanded functionality, with all voice commands being processed locally, never in the cloud. Zoom Rooms participants can now use their voice to ‘wake’ the room system by saying ‘Hello Zoom’, as well as use commands such as ‘start meeting’, ‘leave meeting’, ‘check in’ and more, allowing organizations to create safe, private, and effective hands-free meetings.
TrulyNatural is Sensory’s deep neural network-based, embedded speech recognition platform with natural language understanding. Zoom and Sensory have worked together to leverage the capabilities of TrulyNatural to create domain-specific recognizers designed to handle common voice requests for controlling meetings. They have also developed more complex voice tasks like alphanumeric recognition for using voice to enter meeting IDs and passcodes.
This week we have articles by Sachin Gupta, Panos Moutafis, Matthew J. Schneider, and Dan McCreary, and news from Bloomreach, SparkCognition, Neeva, MerlinOne, and Solo.io.
Opinion / Analysis
To protect consumer data, don’t do everything on the cloud
Sachin Gupta, Panos Moutafis, and Matthew J. Schneider team-up to describe a high-level approach to employing edge computing to reduce risk and dependence on consumer data use. A good read for senior management teams.
Edge computing, in which data is processed locally on hardware instead of on the cloud, can help them do just that by implementing three critical design choices. The design choices begin with how to think about data collection and extend to the actual data processing. They are: 1) sufficiency, or a focus on only must-have data; 2) aggregation, or lumping data together to produce group insights; and 3) alteration, or making minor changes to the data to hide an individual’s identity while minimally impacting the accuracy of insights.
… But how does this tech actually work, and how can companies who don’t have Apple-sized resources deploy it?
Dan McCreary predicts the arrival of a new discipline based on the availability of data stores of enterprise knowledge graphs to increase data analysis productivity. To get there, he argues we need to go beyond current approaches of data warehouses and feature stores to building…
…a set of tools for analysts to connect directly to a well-formed enterprise-scale knowledge graph to get a subset of data and transform it quickly to structures that are immediately useful for analysis. The results of this analysis can then be used to immediately enrich a knowledge graph. These pure Machine Learning approaches can complement the rich library of turn-key graph algorithms that are accessible to developers.
What the heck is a Data Mesh?! A bit technical. This is a critical look at Zhamak Dehghani’s original two posts (links included) and all are worth a read for the seriously interested.
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.
BigCommerce announced it has extended its European presence from the U.K., into the Netherlands, France and Italy. With BigCommerce, merchants will have access to an enterprise-grade ecommerce platform built to sell on a local and global scale. BigCommerce’s expansion will create new roles in France, Italy and the Netherlands to work directly with merchants in the region. As part of this fully localised experience, merchants will be able to use the BigCommerce platform to manage their store in their local language, as well as create a fully localized website experience for their shoppers, with their local payment methods and currencies. BigCommerce has already built an established customer base in each region. Prospective employees interested in local opportunities should visit the career section of the site at.
SparkCognition, an infrastructure-focused artificial intelligence (AI) company announced it has acquired Maana, a digital knowledge platform company. Through this acquisition, SparkCognition gains Maana’s computational knowledge graph technology, its industrial expertise and customers such as Chevron, Shell, Aramco, and Airbus, expanding its Fortune Global 100 footprint with multi-year software agreements. SparkCognition’s AI platform combined with Maana’s digital knowledge management technology will accelerate customers’ time to value in adopting AI-driven decision making across the enterprise. Maana’s software enables subject matter experts to develop AI-driven, business critical solutions. Subject matter experts use Maana’s no-code/low-code tools to encode domain knowledge, decision processes, and critical reasoning, then collaborate with data scientists and developers to build applications that optimize business operations.
Bloomreach announced the launch of its new headless content module, Bloomreach Content. Bloomreach Content is built for commerce, enabling marketers and merchandisers to work as one to build immersive e-commerce experiences that enhance the customer journey.
Businesses of all kinds differentiate through immersive storytelling — content, images, and personalization that connect with customers and encourage them to convert with confidence. To achieve this, marketers and merchandisers must be empowered to work together, seamlessly connecting content and products throughout the consumer’s researching and shopping journey. Bloomreach Content helps close this gap with three areas of differentiation:
Fully SaaS: The Bloomreach Content module is fully SaaS, meaning it’s nimble, easy to implement, upgrades are automatic.
Merchandiser-friendly: Bloomreach Content offers marketers and merchandisers the ability to build and control the customer journey across digital channels, creating, testing, and customizing targeted, on-brand digital experiences.
Commerce-specific tools: Bloomreach Content users can enjoy fast page creation; in-page product merchandising; page scheduling; an API-first architecture; the ability to launch, manage, and customize campaign-specific landing pages and microsites, and more.
The new Bloomreach Content module is also integrated with modern commerce storefronts including Vue Storefront, Next.js Commerce, React Storefront 8, and SAP Spartacus, and supports modern web development platform partners Layer0, Netlify, and Vercel.
MerlinOne announced NOMAD, their new technology to search the visual content of objects, with no dependence on textual metadata. Need a photo of four people at a picnic? Just ask NOMAD to find it for you. Organizations may have their photos, graphics, illustrations and videos in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, but they still cannot find the right object they need while on deadline for a campaign. The problem is the scarcity of useful textual metadata which, so far, has been the only way DAM users can search their collections.
By applying a combination of Deep Learning AI technologies (all developed in-house by MerlinOne) to your search query, NOMAD understands the concept you are looking for and delivers precise results based solely on the visual content of an image, completely independent of the existence or accuracy of its metadata.
NOMAD understands language patterns as well as visual content. Just like it knows to group visually similar images, it also clusters phrases of similar meaning, reducing the dependency on a specific, controlled vocabulary to find what you’re looking for. NOMAD can be combined with other MerlinAI tools such as IMPACT and Visual Similarity to provide additional search capabilities.
