Headless content management systems (CMS) vendor Contentful announced $80 million in Series E funding led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures and five other new and existing backers. This round brings Contentful’s total funding to $158 million to date. Contentful also announced hiring a new CMO, Bridget Perry, who most recently led Adobe marketing across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Contentful is helping businesses manage and deliver content across websites, mobile apps, wearables and digital displays to compete in a digital-first economy. With Contentful, brands can adapt to a changing landscape by scaling up digital offerings across the entire customer journey. Contentful’s cloud-native, API-first platform has attracted a community of developers and users who integrate Contentful with third-party services such as Cloudinary, Commercetools and Smartling to extend the capabilities of the platform. With the recent release of the Contentful App Framework, additional technology partners now offer integrations with Contentful. Contentful’s ecosystem of partners includes digital agencies such as Publicis Sapient, Huge, Valtech and AKQA.
Category: Content technology news (Page 151 of 647)
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Ontotext (OT) and Semantic Web Company (SWC) announced a strategic partnership to meet the requirements of enterprise architects such as deployment, monitoring, resilience, and interoperability with other enterprise IT systems and security. Users will be able to work with a feature-rich toolset to manage a graph composed of billions of edges that is hosted in data centers around the world. The companies have implemented an integration of the PoolParty Semantic SuiteTM v.8 with the GraphDB and Ontotext Platform, which offers benefits for numerous use cases:
- GraphDB powering PoolParty: Most of the knowledge graph management tools out there bundle open-source solutions that are good at managing thousands of concepts, whereas PoolParty bundled with GraphDB manages millions of concepts and entities—without extra deployment overheads.
- PoolParty linked to high-availability GraphDB cluster: GraphDB can now be used as an external store for PoolParty, which offers a combination of performance, scalability and resilience. This is particularly relevant for organizations intent on developing tailor-made knowledge graph platforms integrated into their existing data and content management infrastructure.
- Dynamic text analysis using big knowledge graphs: PoolParty can be used to edit big knowledge graphs in order to tune the behavior of Ontotext’s text analysis pipelines, which employ vast amounts of domain knowledge to boost precision. This way the power and comprehensiveness of generic off-the-shelf natural language processing (NLP) pipelines can be custom-tailored to an enterprise.
- GraphQL benefits for PoolParty: Application developers can now access the knowledge graph via GraphQL to build end-user applications or integrate knowledge graph services with the functionality of existing systems. Ontotext Platform uses semantic business objects, defined by subject matter experts and business analysts, to generate GraphQL interfaces and transform them into SPARQL.
ProQuest is improving the accessibility of subscription and open access content on its platform with a series of enhancements designed to boost research, teaching and learning outcomes. These enhancements include:
- A new starting point for research: Now, users can begin their search from the open web by visiting search.proquest.com. Through their search results, they’ll be delivered straight to the resources their library subscribes to.
- New preview feature: Users can search, find and preview the content of nearly a billion ProQuest documents directly from the open web for better discoverability.
- Broader discovery of open access content: Researchers can access an ever-expanding universe of scholarly full-text open access sources directly – all indexed and delivered with the same level of quality and precision as ProQuest’s subscription content.
These enhancements are now live, with no action required by libraries or their users to activate. They’re part of ProQuest’s larger, ongoing initiative to add value to its solutions, expand pathways to access and help libraries increase usage of their resources.
Cisco announced Webex enhancements including: security and compliance capabilities, intelligent and insights to deliver consistent user experiences, and an integrations with Box for fie sharing and Epic for telehealth.
The Webex platform at 3X the previous capacity; expanded encryption options include AES 256 Bit encryption with GCM mode, providing increased protection for meeting data and resistance against tampering.
New means to manage an enlarged remote workforce and a return to office with Cisco Webex Control Hub provides insights, helping IT manage all collaboration workloads through a single pane of glass whether workers are at home or in the office. New to Control Hub is a cloud-connected UC feature that simplifies IT workflows for hybrid deployments and expanded Webex Calling analytics.
Cisco has integrated Webex Teams and Box, the cloud content management platform. Webex Teams already has a secure file sharing capability. But now customers can choose to use Box as well as any of the other platforms we integrate with.
The new integration with Epic electronic health record software enables providers to use Webex Teams to conduct a video visit with a patient, review medical history and update clinical documentation. Patients don’t need to download anything — they just login to the secure session over a web browser.
Box, Inc. announced improvements to its workflow engine, Box Relay, to automate and accelerate processes around content. The new Relay capabilities include a new library of pre-built templates to make it easier for end users to create workflows without IT support; additionally, Box introduced an integration with File Request and the addition of multi-file support. Box Relay automates everyday processes like digital asset reviews, work order submission approvals, regulatory reporting approvals, and grant reviews. Rolled out in June 2019, Box Relay includes all the benefits of the Box Cloud Content Management platform, including advanced security and compliance, Box Platform APIs, pre-built productivity integrations, and collaboration features.
There are now pre-built templates in Box Relay for common workflows in every department including sales, marketing, HR, legal, finance. A welcome page allows users to create a new workflow or select from a library of Box-published modifiable templates, which comprises 24 common line-of business use cases. Users can modify workflow steps, add pointers to related content, quickly include the right collaborators and task assignees, and kick off the workflow. The integration of File Request into Box Relay streamlines workflows, from content submission to automated downstream processes. File Request, released in May, provides customers with a secure way to get files and metadata from external partners and vendors. With this integration, there is now an automated handoff between File Request and Box Relay workflows. Box also announced the addition of multi-file support for Box Relay workflows, which enables users to package multiple pieces of content together to move in lockstep through a workflow as one entity, including assigning a single task for review and approval. Multi-file support simplifies document handling for business processes that involve multiple files such as product launches, vendor applications, and expense reports.
The new features are included in Box Relay at no additional charge. Multi-file support for Manual Start workflows are expected to be generally available at the end of June. The new library of templates and File Request integration are expected to be generally available at the end of July.
DataStax announced the private beta of Vector, an AIOps service for Apache Cassandra. Vector continually assesses the behavior of a Cassandra cluster to provide developers and operators with automated diagnostics and advice, helping them be consistently successful with Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise (DSE) clusters. Vector provides recommendations with detailed background knowledge and offers multiple ways to fix a problem. With this embedded knowledge base, Vector is able to analyze individual nodes, compare behavior to other nodes in the cluster, and serve up recommendations, such as: Cassandra and operating system configuration, schema design, and Cassandra performance and query techniques. Vector features:
- Automated expert advice – Proactively identifies current and potential issues to help developers and operators solve problems quickly. Automated advice provides contextual learning with background knowledge to build skills.
- Continuous updates – Rules and advice are continuously updated, deployed to SaaS and on-premises applications, and automatically applied to clusters.
- Hands-off management – Advanced visualizations of system usage with insightful charting to understand tables, keyspaces, and nodes. Vector helps developers and operators see and understand how the cluster is performing and its configuration without having to log into Cassandra nodes.
- Cassandra skills development – Helps strengthen Cassandra skills and knowledge by providing detailed advice and recommendations. Vector helps to reduce unexpected and unplanned items.
ABBYY announced the launch of NeoML, an open-source library for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. Available now on GitHub, NeoML supports both deep learning and traditional machine learning algorithms. The cross-platform framework is optimized for applications that run in cloud environments, on desktop and mobile devices. Compared to a popular open-source library (according to internal tests) NeoML offers 15-20% faster performance for pre-trained image processing models. Developers can use NeoML to build, train, and deploy models for object identification, classification, semantic segmentation, verification, and predictive modeling.
NeoML is designed as a universal tool to process and analyze data in a variety of formats including text, image, video, and others. It supports C++, Java, and Objective-C programming languages; Python will be added shortly. NeoML’s neural network models support over 100 layer types. It also offers 20+ traditional ML algorithms such as classification, regression, and clustering frameworks. The library is cross-platform – a single code base that can be run on popular operating systems including Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android – and optimized for both CPU and GPU processors.
NeoML supports the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), a global open ecosystem for interoperable ML models. The ONNX standard is supported jointly by Microsoft, Facebook, and other partners as an open source project. ABBYY invites developers, data scientists, and business analysts to use and contribute to NeoML on GitHub, where its code is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. The company offers developer support, ongoing review of reports, regular updates, and performance enhancements.
Microsoft Corp. and SAS announced an extensive technology and go-to-market strategic partnership. The two companies will enable customers to run their SAS workloads in the cloud, and will migrate SAS’ analytical products and industry solutions onto Microsoft Azure as the preferred cloud provider for the SAS Cloud. SAS’ industry solutions and expertise will also bring value to Microsoft’s customers across health care, financial services and many other industries. This will include optimizing SAS Viya, the latest release of the company’s cloud-native offering, for Azure as well as integrating SAS’ deep portfolio of industry solutions into the Azure Marketplace. Additionally, Microsoft and SAS will explore opportunities to integrate SAS analytics capabilities, including industry-specific models, within Azure and Dynamics 365 and build new market-ready joint solutions for customers that are natively integrated with SAS services across multiple vertical industries. Microsoft and SAS are already supporting customers with solutions that help them capitalize on the vast amount of data being generated by the Internet of Things by combining Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform with SAS’ edge-to-cloud IoT analytics and AI capabilities. Additional SAS products and solutions will begin rolling out later this year.

