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Lowe’s Acquires Retail Analytics Platform From Boomerang Commerce

Home improvement retailer sharpens focus on delivering best-in-class retail technology

Lowe’s Companies, Inc. announced it is accelerating its technology capabilities and focus on driving strong retail fundamentals by acquiring the Retail Analytics platform from Boomerang Commerce. The technology will be integrated into the company’s core retail business and bolster strategic and data-driven pricing and merchandise assortment decisions across Lowe’s businesses.

The platform provides a retail analytics solution that processes product and pricing datasets to convert them to insights and actions. The acquisition is designed to assist in modernizing and digitizing Lowe’s approach to pricing.

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“One of the key components of our transformation here at Lowe’s is to modernize our technology. Pricing and Assortment Planning have been identified as strategic areas in need of modernization. And when we find the right assets available to buy and advance our strategy, we’ll do that,” said Seemantini Godbole, Lowe’s Chief Information Officer. “Adding this team and technology to our existing capabilities helps us leverage the right data quickly, effectively and successfully.”

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Boomerang Commerce was founded by Guru Hariharan in 2012 and is based in Mountain View, California. Lowe’s acquisition includes the proprietary technology and tools for the Retail Analytics platform but excludes customer contracts and related confidential information and data. As part of the transaction, some associates from the Retail Analytics teams based in Bangalore and the United States will join Lowe’s. After this acquisition, Boomerang Commerce’s product CommerceIQ, which automates e-commerce growth for leading consumer brands, will operate as an independent business under the CommerceIQ.ai name with Mr. Hariharan as CEO.

“The Retail Analytics team is thrilled to join Lowe’s and has high regard for the company’s leadership in the home improvement industry,” Hariharan said. “This transaction culminates a successful relationship over the past four years.”

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Appian Announces 2019 Partner Award Winners

Appian announced its 2019 Partner Impact and Excellence award winners across six categories. These strategic partners were selected based on their success in helping companies develop applications that execute their business strategies using the Appian low-code platform. Appian’s partner ecosystem consists of organizations that provide world-class solutions and services globally across a variety of industries.

Appian 2019 Partner Impact and Excellence Award winners include the following:

  • Value Award – Macedon: Awarded the Appian 2019 Value Award for delivering consulting and implementation services on Appian for a decade with excellent qualifications in implementation strategy and experience, as well as high A-scores. The company is also an Appian reseller and prides itself on rapid delivery of high-value applications (such as an application to track money movements, invoices and investments for a financial services company that was deployed in less than eight weeks).
  • Innovation Award – PwC: Appian’s 2019 Innovation Award goes to PwC for its ground-breaking Health Care Provider (HCP)/Health Care Organization (HCO) Interactions Solution which transforms transparency and compliance within the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences industry. PwC’s Appian-based solution significantly accelerates implementation timeline and allows organizations to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, while reducing cost, improving compliance, and driving overall business value.
  • Growth Award – Cognizant: Recognized as Appian’s 2019 Growth Award winner, Cognizant showcases significant investment in, and advancement of, its global Appian practice. Cognizant has consistently held one of the top spots for highest-number of certified practitioners in the market, and has also shown significant investment through its integration with artificial intelligence/machine learning, api/micro-services, and robotic process automation.
  • Transformation Award – KPMG: Receiving Appian’s 2019 Transformation Award for its outstanding achievement in driving global digital transformation programs, KPMG continues to demonstrate its depth of Appian expertise and extensive delivery capabilities that drive programs for multiple Fortune 100 companies. KPMG has also integrated Appian into its Ignite Platform of AI Services, in order to deliver solutions such as Cognitive Contract Management, Intelligent Contact Center, and other customer-focused solutions.

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Appian Reseller Awards

  • US SMB Reseller of the Year – Bits in Glass: With the highest number of new customer wins amongst all resellers in the United States, Bits In Glass made significant investments in building a sales organization focused on Appian and delivered outstanding results throughout the year.
  • LATAM Reseller of the Year – MBGE Intersistemas: Greatly expanding the Appian footprint in Latin America, MBGE successfully closed key customer accounts while building and delivering a number of risk and compliance solutions for manufacturing, retail and financial services customers. For example, their “Aranxel Premium” solution, developed on Appian, is used by global manufacturing companies to enforce operational compliance with Foreign Trade (Export/Import) regulations for businesses in Mexico.

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“PwC strives to build trust in society and solve important problems,” said Tim Canonico, Partner, PwC. “Our strategic partnership with Appian enables us to do just that. Leveraging low-code technology to build and deploy ground-breaking solutions in as little as eight weeks is a game changer for our clients. We are honored to receive this award and look forward to continuing our work with Appian in the years to come.”

“We value our partner ecosystem and are proud to work alongside them as they help companies put together the proper strategy, tools and solutions necessary to thrive in the global digital landscape,” said Marc Wilson, Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships & Industries, Appian. “These partners have embodied the excellence that we require and have gone above and beyond in these areas. We look forward to continue partnering with them and delivering solutions that address the challenges our customers are facing.”

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Amazon Dominates E-Commerce Share, Ebay and Walmart Less of a Focus, Feedvisor Study Finds

70 percent of sellers saw Amazon revenue growth in 2018

Feedvisor, the “AI-first” optimization and intelligence platform for large sellers and brands on Amazon, unveiled its State of the Amazon Marketplace 2019 report. The analysis exemplifies Amazon’s unmatched influence over e-commerce seller success, as well as the elevated roles that private labels and advertising will continue to play.

To understand the evolving state of Amazon’s dynamic marketplace, Feedvisor conducted an in-depth analysis on sellers’ goals, plans for expansion, revenue figures, areas of concern, advertising strategies, and more. Findings include:

  • Sellers continue to see significant growth on Amazon: For nearly half of sellers (49 percent), all or most (80 to 100 percent) of their annual e-commerce revenue comes from Amazon. Likewise, nearly three-quarters of sellers (70 percent) saw revenue growth in the last year, with a majority (61 percent) seeing growth by as much as 40 percent.
  • Loyalty to Amazon grows, wanes for Walmart and eBay: Nearly two in five Amazon sellers (37 percent) do not plan to expand to other marketplaces this year, up by 5 percent from 2018. Similarly, the percentage of sellers who plan to expand to Walmart (17 percent) and eBay (10 percent) declined from last year, by 8 and 9 percent respectively.
  • Private labels gain importance for sellers: The majority of sellers (62 percent) have private label products in their catalogs, and one-quarter (25 percent) are exclusively selling private label products. As such, launching new private label brands is a 2019 business goal for nearly one-third of sellers (32 percent).

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“Amazon has become the go-to shopping destination — nearly three-quarters of consumers go straight to the platform when they are ready to purchase a product,” said Dani Nadel, President and Chief Operating Officer, Feedvisor. “For that reason, Amazon is the single most important tool for businesses to leverage today. An agile Amazon strategy can help sellers maximize their reach, relevance, and revenue, as well as drive optimal performance.”

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As Amazon continues to explore tactics that support its customer-first business model, the report shows that sellers are eager to improve the customer-facing aspects of their businesses:

  • Advertising is biggest area for improvement: Though nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of sellers are already advertising on Amazon, two-thirds of sellers (68 percent) are spending $10,000 or less on it each month. Strategic advertising is the no. 1 area of business sellers would like to improve over the next year (51 percent).
  • Positive customer feedback is a top priority: With Amazon’s customer-centric business model, an overwhelming majority (95 percent) of sellers said ratings and reviews are important to their business on Amazon. Likewise, nearly half (49 percent) cited this as an area they want to improve on in the next year.

The Amazon Marketplace is a source of tremendous opportunity, but it is also complex and ever-changing — our analysis found that the majority of sellers need help managing their Amazon operation,” Nadel continued. “With support from intelligent, AI-driven technology, data, and industry experts, sellers can accurately measure their end-to-end performance and develop strategies to stay one step ahead of the competition.”

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Xignite CEO to Give Keynote on Migrating Market Data to the Cloud at The North American Financial Information Summit – NAFIS 2019

Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of market data cloud solutions for financial services has been selected to present a keynote case study at The North American Financial Information Summit – NAFIS 2019, a technology-focused conference for senior data, compliance and technology executives.

Stephane Dubois, CEO and Founder of Xignite, will discuss the benefits for large financial institutions in migrating their real-time market data to the cloud. He also will review the pros and cons of several deployment approaches, as well as dive into the unique challenges of scalability, migration and reliability.

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Xignite’s presentation will take place on May 21 at the event.

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Xignite Makes Market Data Easy. Xignite is leading the disruption of the market data industry with its AWS-based financial data distribution and market data management solutions. Xignite’s Market Data Cloud Platform provides market data managers full transparency on the usage of a firms first-level real-time and reference data – making it easy for data owners to entitle, control consumption, comply with licensing requirements, allocate costs, and resolve vendor audits or invoice discrepancies. Xignite also powers financial data-driven robo-advisors, online brokerages, and investing apps with its real-time, delayed and historical pricing data offered via 500+ REST Cloud APIs.

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Verasity Announces Integration with YouTube

Leading eSports organization 3DMAX also brings rewarded video player onboard; further cementing gaming audience

Verasity, a blockchain-based platform that provides infrastructure of rewarded video and loyalty programs to online viewers, is excited to announce that integration is available for its patent-pending Video Rewarded Player with YouTube, which with 149 billion page views a month is the world’s leading video player. This integration reiterates Verasity’s position as a leader in the digital video space and shows the utility of rewarded platforms in today’s content creation environment.

“Verasity’s integration with YouTube marks a true milestone in harmonizing audience development for content creators with tools to foster loyalty among viewers,” says Chris Gale, co-founder of Verasity. “The platform will bring transparency into how digital video views and audiences get monetized. Moreover, our partnership with 3DMAX will introduce and bring our technology in front of the gamer viewer demographic, an influential and pivotal audience in the online media space.”

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The first official YouTube integration of the Verasity Video Rewarded Player will be with leading eSports organization 3DMAX. By building in the Verasity player, Verasity will help sustain 3DMAX as a leading community among gaming enthusiasts, as it will be the first to offer viewers VRA, Verasity’s signature token. The reward token will be available via both 3DMAX’s embedded YouTube content, as well as its embedded stream on Twitch, the premier gaming streaming service.

Verasity’s moves to connect with YouTube, 3DMax—and by extension, the gaming community as a whole—are a natural continuation of its recent track record of success within the video platform space. Within the past few weeks, Verasity has unveiled SDK modules with Twitch and Vimeo, the world’s second-largest online video platform, in addition to its existing implementations with JW Player, Brightcove, Kaltura, Flowplayer, and Video.js. In total, these online video players deliver in excess of 110 billion views per month and collectively representing 95 percent of global digital video content. Verasity expects to reach 1 million viewers on its platform by the end of 2019 and 10 million viewers by the end of 2020.

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“Rewarded video stands to revolutionize both the consumer and creator side of digital content. Integrating the platform into key video viewership platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo will mean that more viewers will want to opt in and support their content channels of choice,” Gale continues. “By encouraging viewers to click in, view, and support new content, more outlets will be encouraged to produce content, creating a virtuous cycle.”

The utility of Verasity’s rewarded video platform offers use cases for brands as well. After implementing the Verasity Video Reward module into their websites, branded video content publishers such as BMW will be able to use the token to enhance their audience development initiatives. Publishers get loyalty and new revenue, while viewers get rewarded for their attention. This encourages engagement and audience development, and cycles revenues back to publisher sites.

“Rewarded content is a democratizer for video content producers and consumers alike. Our integration on YouTube is an integral step forward in making this revolution happen,” says Gale. “Verasity is proud to be at the forefront.”

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Ubimo Location Intelligence Allows Kinetic to Connect the Digital and Physical Worlds for Out-Of-Home (OOH) Advertisers

Ubimo Bolsters Kinetic’s Ability to Elevate Out-of-Home Media into the Omni-Channel Planning Process with Digital and Behavioral Data to Drive and Verify Impact

Ubimo, a leading location intelligence technology company will enable Kinetic US, the leading digital innovator in out-of-home (OOH) advertising, to provide real-time audience segmentation to any geographic entity to improve OOH campaign performance for their clients.

By incorporating Ubimo’s technology, Kinetic will be able to apply any digital data set to the location of OOH and digital-out-of-home (DOOH) properties, optimize plans and access audience segmentation and insights at the individual place level. Leveraging these capabilities, Kinetic can connect digital data, audience movement and physical locations across the US, ranging from OOH properties to stores, venues and other points of interest (POIs). The platform will also enable Kinetic to attribute foot traffic lift to OOH campaigns.

“Ubimo’s platform will empower Kinetic to better align our clients’ OOH and DOOH campaigns to the dominant digital strategies, tactics and measurement they rely upon to produce their best results. We expect to develop more impactful, effective plans that work with mobile to deliver optimized solutions that exceed our clients’ business and marketing objectives,” said Michael Lieberman, co-CEO of Kinetic US.

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Through machine learning methodologies developed specifically for OOH media owners and agencies, Ubimo is able to define POIs and desired audience types and, for example, rank or index over- or under-performing OOH properties and create audience segments or expand audiences with predictive modeling as well as attribute the impact of a campaign on lift and foot traffic. Anonymized and aggregated data are used for campaign planning and execution, as well as in-campaign and post-campaign insights. Its platform Polaris is used by leaders in OOH, Shopper Marketing and Retail.

“We have built a technology that allows marketers to run audience-based planning and attribution in the physical world. By layering digital, location, and aggregated behavior data with Ubimo, marketers can now understand what places attract what audiences and therefore define the best properties for a campaign,” said Gilad Amitai, COO of Ubimo. “This technology will allow out-of-home, which has traditionally been siloed from the wider media mix, to be a strong part of the omni-channel strategy. We are excited to work with Kinetic, and see the ways they will leverage location intelligence as part of their continued commitment to innovation and success for their clients.”

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In December 2018, Forrester identified the need to connect the physical and digital worlds, and recognized Ubimo as one of the most significant location intelligence platform providers. The leading industry analyst firm gave it the highest possible scores for performance and execution of roadmap criteria, and noted its ability to embed decision making actions and experiences, which resonate with those in the OOH space, like Kinetic.

According to Out of Home Advertising Association of America, 4% of total U.S. media spend is OOH. The current forecasts peg DOOH growth at 10% every year over the next four years. This year alone, the expectation is that digital will account for around 37% of the overall OOH spend, which is a 35% jump from 2018.

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Chorus.ai Named a 2019 Hot Vendor in Conversational Intelligence by Aragon Research

Chorus.ai, the leading Conversation Intelligence Platform for high-growth sales and customer success teams, today announced its inclusion in Aragon Research’s 2019 Hot Vendor report.

@AragonResearch1 recognizes @chorus_ai as one of the 2019 Hot Vendors in Conversation Intelligence. #conversationintelligence #HotVendor

The Hot Vendors for 2019 report issued by Aragon Research recognizes noteworthy, visionary and innovative vendors in conversational intelligence, image and video analytics, unified communications and collaboration, and learning. Specifically, Chorus.ai was included within the section, “Hot Vendors in Conversational Intelligence.” According to Aragon Research, “The emerging conversational intelligence market is enabling organizations to predict customer or prospect behavior by using AI-based voice analytics1.” Aragon identified four Hot Vendors with interesting and cutting-edge products, services, or technologies.

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Chorus.ai’s advanced speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP) and AI technology enable teams to immediately discover moments that impact selling outcomes and use those insights for real-time sales coaching and to replicate sales best practices. The company’s proprietary AI automatically identifies and curates such moments for sales and customer success teams, thus freeing sales representatives to focus on building relationships.

“There is a plethora of tools focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of sales calls and touting an AI component,” said Jim Lundy, CEO of Aragon Research. “Chorus received the Hot Vendor recognition because of its AI- and NLP-enabled platform that records, transcribes and provides a summary of key discussion points and metrics that took place in a sales call.”

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“Sales leaders have access to more data than ever,” said Roy Raanani, CEO and Co-Founder of Chorus.ai. “Moving the needle on sales performance requires smart systems that can highlight what to pay attention to, and get those insights to the right people. Our AI capabilities enable that for the first time ever, resulting in real business impact.”

Chorus.ai was also recently named a Top 50 product for sales in 2019 by G2 Crowd and won a Gold Stevie Award for Sales Performance Management. Leading companies like Adroll, Marketo, Qualtrics, InVision and Asana use Chorus.ai to measure and improve sales conversations and to implement best practices in sales enablement, resulting in improved sales performance while also allowing users to become more customer-centric and data-driven.

Inclusion in the Aragon Hot Vendor list is announced directly after Chorus.ai’s win of the 2019 Excellence in Customer Service Award for Best Technology of the Year by Business Intelligence Group. The company also recently announced SmartPlaylists for mobile.

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Punchh Launches Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence “Customer Sentiment Analysis” to Enable Real-Time Response to Customer Reviews

New technology helps physical retailers understand customer feedback and act immediately to increase retention and drive loyalty

Punchh, the leader in digital marketing solutions for physical retailers, announced the launch of Punchh Deep Sentiment Analysis. The new product allows brands to extract valuable insights from customer reviews using Punchh’s natural language comprehension engine built with industry-leading deep learning and artificial intelligence.

“Punchh is the only product that gives us an easy way to not only monitor and understand customer reviews, but also take instant action to address the concerns and comments of our guests in a thoughtful and impactful way.”

Punchh Deep Sentiment Analysis integrates seamlessly with the Punchh Marketing Cloud, offering real-time descriptive and predictive analytics in a user-friendly dashboard with one-click navigation. Its natural language processing model achieves human-level performance, defined as more than 93 percent accurate, and features multi-language support.

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“In today’s hyper-competitive climate, brands need to do everything they can to foster and nurture direct customer relationships, and paying attention to customer reviews is an essential part of that,” said Shyam Rao, CEO of Punchh. “Manually reading every review is prohibitively time-consuming for most retailers, which leads to slower response times and poor customer experiences. Our solution uses AI and machine learning to help brands analyze reviews at scale and immediately identify critical information so they can focus on high-level insights and make quick decisions to strengthen customer relationships and increase loyalty.”

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Punchh Deep Sentiment Analysis offers brand marketers the following features and capabilities:

  • Monitors trendlines in key sentiment categories such as customer service, quality, wait times, and ambience
  • Runs campaign studies to gauge the success of specific initiatives including new products, new locations, mobile apps and more
  • Distributes personalized recommendations through chat and voice-based customer service to offer support and prevent churn
  • Minimizes biases with large training data sets from collective reviewer experiences
  • Maintains full access to original reviews

“We thrive on guest feedback at City Barbeque – we read every single review. As we have grown, the number of reviews we receive has also grown. With this new solution from Punchh we are able to understand the bigger picture more clearly so that we can create the best guest experience possible,” said Brian Hipsher, VP Marketing of City Barbeque. “Punchh is the only product that gives us an easy way to not only monitor and understand customer reviews, but also take instant action to address the concerns and comments of our guests in a thoughtful and impactful way.”

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Lucidchart Introduces Visual Reasoning Engine to Usher in the Powerful Combination of Diagramming, Collaboration and Data Visualization

Lucidchart, the leading visual workspace, announced its visual reasoning engine, which powers the platform’s automation and data visualization capabilities, along with new features and integrations designed to combine diagramming, collaboration and data visualization to accelerate understanding and drive innovation.

Lucidchart enables its more than 15 million users to gain an elevated perspective on complex problems and processes through its powerful diagramming core and collaboration features. The addition of the visual reasoning engine allows users to automate layout and easily pull in data from multiple platforms—Salesforce, AWS, Google Sheets and more—to layer on additional information that can provide added context for a more comprehensive view of relationships, interdependencies and areas of improvement, helping professionals of all fields solve problems, drive better business decisions and innovate faster.

“We’ve always tried to help people make sense of their business, but having so much data to manage and understand can get complicated. We’re making it easier and more intuitive for people to understand information in context and how it affects their organization,” said Karl Sun, CEO of Lucidchart. “The visual reasoning engine and the insights it will allow users to uncover will make it easier than ever for our customers to act on that data and do more with the information hiding within their organization.”

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The visual reasoning engine that powers the Lucidchart Visual Workspace consists of three main pillars:

  • Data integrations: Visualize information from other systems through powerful data integrations. In addition to existing integrations with a number of platforms, new features and integrations include the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, allowing sales teams to more effectively coordinate, communicate and execute account-based strategies to close deals faster; and Zapier, which connects Lucidchart to more than 1,500 other web services to allow users to automate work and maximize productivity.
  • Automated layout: Spend less time creating and more time on strategy, collaboration and decision-making by auto-generating visuals within Lucidchart. Easily import data sets for org charts, network infrastructures and more to Lucidchart, and automatically create a diagram based on your specific parameters. You can also use new features like smart containers to help sort information to get a different perspective on your data to gain additional clarity and help make smarter decisions faster.
  • Data in context: Powered by the visual reasoning engine, data visualization allows you to get better insights fast by seeing data in context of ideas, systems and processes already documented in Lucidchart. With features like dynamic shapes, users will be able to monitor the most important metrics visually, as well as bring live data into Lucidchart and create dashboards to show the progress, completion or growth of projects.

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These new dynamic features will help across multiple industries and use cases, including:

  • Helping business analysts visualize processes to gain insight and understanding needed to optimize for maximum efficiency and track progress.
  • Enabling sales orgs to see the big picture of a deal through account maps, allowing for a faster, more clear understanding of the path to sale.
  • Empowering engineering teams to build dynamic org charts automatically and providing the functionality to easily organize employees in scrum teams or other subgroups.

To help usher in this new data-centric phase of business, Lucidchart has also added Kelly Breslin Wright, former Tableau EVP of sales who was pivotal in guiding the company from its startup launch to a successful IPO and more than $800 million in annual revenue, to its board of directors. Kelly’s go-to-market expertise and enterprise experience make her a pivotal addition as Lucidchart continues to expand its use around the world.

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