The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Gilbane Advisor 11-20-24 — AI “supercycle”, old typefaces, Typst

November 20, 2024 /

This week we feature articles from Rita Kind-Envy, jreyesr, and Dharmesh Thakker, Danel Dayan, Jason Mendel, Sudhee Chilappagari, Patrick Hsu & Payal Modi.

Additional reading comes from Giuseppe Futia, Joel Cunningham, Manuj Dhariwa & Shruti Dhariwal, and Aeree Cho, Grace C. Kim, Alexander Karpekov, Alec Helbling, Jay Wang, Seongmin Lee, Benjamin Hoover, & Polo Chau.

News comes from Box, Snowflake, Brightcove, and Elastic.

It’s hard to believe it’s time for our annual holiday break, especially given the sunny and 60ish weather here in Boston. See you in early January.

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

Opinion / Analysis

Inside the coming AI market “supercycle” and how cloud startups can benefit

The Battery Ventures 2024 State of OpenCloud Report

Dharmesh Thakker, Danel Dayan, Jason Mendel, Sudhee Chilappagari, Patrick Hsu, and Payal Modi provide an optimistic case for investing in AI technology. There is a short summary, followed by lots of useful charts to peruse. (3 min summary)

https://www.battery.com/blog/opencloud-2024

Before Times New Roman, there was something better

What was the 14th century font that foreshadowed Times New Roman? Why are they both so readable? You do care about readability don’t you? Well, even if you don’t, Rita Kind-Envy’s short piece is a fun read, and if nothing else “…you can casually drop what Humanistic minuscule is on your colleagues. Random facts are cool…” (7 min)

https://uxdesign.cc/before-times-new-roman-there-was-something-better-e227f34796c4

Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

I have to admit to a certain nostalgia for markup languages and formatting software given my time working on and with both. As “jreyesr” says, Typst looks like an interesting project, and his post was well worth the time to read. (85 min)

https://blog.jreyesr.com/posts/typst

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Box announces Box AI Studio

Box AI Studio delivers the ability to choose AI models and enables the creation and deployment of Box AI agents tailored to unique needs.
https://blog.box.com/intelligent-content-management-innovations-boxworks-2024

Snowflake announces availability of Unistore with Hybrid Tables

Unistore with Hybrid Tables brings transactional and analytical data together in a single unified platform, simplifying data architectures.
https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/unistore-general-availability

Brightcove launches Marketing Studio for sales

The solution empowers global sales teams to create personalized videos while centralized teams manage brand quality and optimize content.
https://www.brightcove.com/en/company/press/brightcove-launches-marketing-studio-for-sales

Elastic announces AI ecosystem to accelerate GenAI application development

Elasticsearch vector database integrations with curated AI technology provides developers resources to expedite the deployment of RAG applications.
https://ir.elastic.co/news/news-details/2024/Elastic-Announces-AI-Ecosystem-to-Accelerate-GenAI-Application-Development/default.aspx

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, 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

Brightcove launches Marketing Studio for Sales

November 14, 2024 /

Brightcove launched Brightcove Marketing Studio for Sales, for global sales teams to easily create and deploy personalized video content. The video engagement platform gives companies control over brand and quality standards while providing unified measurement and insights across content and touch-points. Sales teams can create personalized video experiences for prospects and customers without needing video production expertise. 

  • Centralized brand management: Create and control centrally managed video templates with embedded brand guidelines and streamlined approval processes.
  • Integration: Aligns with existing martech stacks, workflows, and processes, for rapid adoption by sales teams.
  • Scalable video personalization: Publish videos on branded landing pages and social platforms, and with Brightcove’s AI Universal Translator (expected availability January 2025) sales can engage global audiences in over 130 languages.
  • User-friendly video creation: The platform’s user-friendly tools allow sales teams to record new content, swap footage, add voiceovers, include music and graphics, and implement interactive elements.
  • Enhanced engagement and analytics: Built-in video analytics deliver insights into prospect engagement, completion rates, and impressions.

Brightcove Launches Marketing Studio For Sales, Putting Video In The Hands Of Global Sales Teams To Drive Engagement And Accelerate Business Results

Elastic announces AI ecosystem to accelerate GenAI application development

November 14, 2024 /

Elastic a Search AI Company, announced its AI ecosystem to help enterprise developers accelerate building and deploying their Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. The Elastic AI Ecosystem provides developers with a curated, comprehensive set of AI technologies and tools integrated with the Elasticsearch vector database, designed to speed time-to-market, ROI delivery, and innovation.

The Elastic AI Ecosystem offers developers pre-built Elasticsearch vector database integrations from a trusted network of AI companies to deliver seamless access to the critical components of GenAI applications across AI models, cloud infrastructure, MLOps frameworks, data prep and ingestion platforms, and AI security & operations. These integrations help developers:

  • Deliver more relevant experiences through RAG
  • Prepare and ingest data from multiple sources
  • Experiment with and evaluate AI models
  • Leverage GenAI development frameworks
  • Observe and securely deploy AI applications

The Elastic AI Ecosystem includes integrations with Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic’s Claude, Cohere, Confluent, Dataiku, DataRobot, Galileo, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Microsoft, Mistral AI, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Protect AI, RedHat, Vectorize, and Unstructured.

https://ir.elastic.co/news/news-details/2024/Elastic-Announces-AI-Ecosystem-to-Accelerate-GenAI-Application-Development/default.aspx

Snowflake announces availability of Unistore with Hybrid Tables

November 12, 2024 /

Snowflake announced its modern approach to bring transactional and analytical data together in a single, unified platform with Unistore. Unistore is powered by Hybrid Tables (now available on AWS), a table type that enables fast, high-concurrency point operations to support transactional workloads. With Unistore, customers can simplify their data architectures, while ensuring consistent security and governance across their data. 

As a part of Unistore, Hybrid Tables intelligently identify when a query is transactional or analytical in nature to provide customers with the most optimal query performance. Hybrid Tables run double-digit millisecond point operations alongside users’ analytical queries, all within Snowflake. With Hybrid Tables, organizations can now harness all of their data to unlock various use cases including:

  • State Management: Enabling users to maintain application and workflow state in real-time, removing the need to manage multiple database systems.
  • Data Serving: Empowering users to serve low-latency data for their apps, without having to move between databases, while maintaining a unified governance and security model.
  • Building Lightweight Transactional Apps: Helping users build lightweight transactional apps with Snowflake’s expanded support for transactional capabilities, simplifying both app development and their architectures.

https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/unistore-general-availability

Box announces Box AI Studio

November 12, 2024 /

Box, Inc., an Intelligent Content Management (ICM) platform, announced a new set of AI-powered enhancements to advance how organizations manage content. Box AI, initially an AI assistant that could answer questions or generate content, has evolved into Box AI Studio, a platform enabling enterprises to apply AI to complex use cases.

Box customers can now choose from a variety of models offered by our AI model partners and customize their agent prompts with specific instructions — like how to respond to a particular question in a way that reflects the business’s context and the brand tone. These personalized agents can then be used to help perform tasks and get insights in a precise and standardized way, enabling organizations to leverage them for specific workflows and deliver the relevant and accurate results.

Box also announced Box Apps, available in Beta today, a no-code solution that makes it easier to create intelligent applications that manage content-centric business processes throughout the enterprise, and Enterprise Advanced, a new plan that combines the full power of the Box Intelligent Content Management platform into a single offering.

Box AI Studio and Enterprise Advanced will roll out in January 2025.

https://blog.box.com/intelligent-content-management-innovations-boxworks-2024

Gilbane Advisor 11-6-24 — Undead agents, Breaking web

November 5, 2024 /

This week we feature articles from Rafe Brena, and Benjamin Brooks. 

Additional reading comes from Jenna Ahart, Astasia Myers, Van Chien Nguyen et al, and Joan Westenberg.

News comes from OpenAI, Coveo & Shopify, DataStax, and Salesforce.

Our next issue will arrive November 20.

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

Opinion / Analysis

Agents are coming back from the dead

Rafe Brena has a delightful piece on the history of agents. It is fun, non-technical, and should be of interest to “anybody thinking about developing “agents” or just considering using them.” Be sure to checkout the link to Apple’s 1987 five-minute video of a “Knowledge Navigator”. (8 min)

https://pub.towardsai.net/agents-are-coming-back-from-the-dead-50c929ab8387

AI search could break the web

Developers should act before governments fall back on blunt tools.

Navigating the complex intersection of web ecosystem health, copyright and legal issues, AI / machine learning ethical issues, and current and potential regulations, is daunting. Even moreso given diverse type of expertise required for well-informed decision making. Benjamin Brooks provides some helpful clarity. (6 min)

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/31/1106504/ai-search-could-break-the-web

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon or links to sources.
https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search

Coveo partners with Shopify

The partnership brings AI search, generative, product discovery and dynamic session optimization commerce experiences to enterprise customers.
https://www.coveo.com/en/integrations/shopify-search

DataStax expands Astra DB extension for GitHub Copilot

Manage and interact with Astra DB and create Langflow GenAI applications through a more intuitive natural language interface.
https://www.datastax.com/blog/astra-db-extension-github-copilot-updates

Salesforce launches Agentforce

Agentforce delivers autonomous AI agents that can connect to enterprise data and take action across sales, service, marketing, and commerce.
https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2024/10/29/agentforce-general-availability-announcement/

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, 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

Coveo partners with Shopify

October 31, 2024 /

Coveo, an enterprise AI platform that brings AI Search and generative AI to every point–of-experience, announced they have partnered with Shopify to bring its commerce AI capabilities to Shopify enterprise customers.

Coveo will give Shopify enterprise merchants the ability to manage AI models and strategies for search relevance and semantic precision, personalization, recommendations and generative shopper experiences, enabling AI-powered product discovery and dynamic session optimization to drive higher conversion, revenue and margins within large scale and complex B2B, B2C and D2C businesses. Shopify merchants will have access to:

  • Search: Query suggestions, personalized 1:1 results, partial part # match, cross-reference lookups, powered by AI and semantics.
  • Personalization: with real-time individualized AI-powered search results creating a relevant experience for known or anonymous visitors.
  • Recommendations: Product and content recommendations augmented in-session based on real-time shopper behavior and intent cues.
  • Indexing: Unified indexing enables product discovery, regardless of catalog complexity.
  • Generative Experiences: Guided advisory experiences educating customers on products and putting retailers’ content to work in the discovery journey.
  • AI and ML Models: Deliver solutions for your shopper journey; from query suggestions to personalized and business-aware ranking.
  • Merchandising and insights: Controls to schedule campaigns, drive experimentation and apply business rules on top of AI.

https://www.coveo.com/en/integrations/shopify-search

OpenAI introduces ChatGPT search

October 31, 2024 /

ChatGPT can now search the web so you can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes. Chats now include links to sources, such as news articles and blog posts.

ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon. Go deeper with follow-up questions, and ChatGPT will consider the full context of your chat. Chats include links to sources, such as news articles and blog posts, giving you a way to learn more.

The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview. ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners.

Search will be available at chatgpt.com⁠ and our desktop and mobile apps. All ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, will have access today. Enterprise and Edu users will get access in the next few weeks. We’ll roll out to all Free users over the coming months.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search

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