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Ericsson ConsumerLab Report Busts Myths Surrounding the Value of 5G for Consumers

Consumers see a near-term benefit from 5G, as they look forward to the technology providing relief from urban network congestion, and to bring more home broadband choices

Ericsson has released a new ConsumerLab report, 5G Consumer Potential, which busts industry myths surrounding the value of 5G for consumers and outlines the opportunities available for communications service providers.

Backed by solid research from one of the biggest ever consumer expectation studies, the report looks at the potential of 5G to benefit consumers, uncovering certain realities about them (“consumer realities”) to bust the following four common industry myths:

1.       5G offers consumers no short-term benefits.

2.       There are no real use cases for 5G, nor is there a price premium on 5G.

3.       Smartphones will be the “silver bullet” for 5G: the magical single solution to delivering fifth-generation services.

4.       Current usage patterns can be used to predict future 5G demand.

The study brings some sense of reality to the ongoing debate in the ICT industry about whether there is an opportunity for a premium consumer offering based on 5G’s extra capabilities.

The key findings of the study include the fact that consumers expect 5G to provide relief from urban network congestion in the near term – especially in megacities, where six in 10 smartphone users report facing network issues in crowded areas. The respondents also anticipate more home broadband choices to be available with the launch of 5G.

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The report also dispels the ICT industry myth that consumers are unwilling to pay a premium on 5G. In fact, smartphone users state that they are willing to pay 20 percent more for fifth-generation services, and half of early adopters as much as 32 percent more. However, four in 10 of these high spenders expect new use cases and payment models as well as a secure 5G network in addition to a consistently high internet speed.

Another key finding is that current 4G usage patterns are not indicative of future usage behaviors. Video consumption is set to rise with 5G. Consumers expect to not only stream video in higher resolutions but also use immersive video formats such as Augmented reality (AR) and Virtual reality (VR), resulting in an additional three hours of video content being watched weekly on mobile devices by users in the 5G future when they are out and about, including one hour wearing AR glasses or VR headsets. The study also reveals that one in five smartphone users’ data usage could reach more than 200GB per month on a 5G device by 2025.

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From these insights and more, Ericsson ConsumerLab has drawn up a consumer roadmap of use cases involving 31 different applications and services. The roadmap is divided into six use-case categories, namely: entertainment and media; enhanced mobile broadband; gaming and AR/VR applications; smart home and fixed wireless access; automotive and transportation; and shopping and immersive communications.

Jasmeet Singh Sethi, Head of ConsumerLab, Ericsson Research, says: “Through our research, we have busted four myths about consumers’ views on 5G and answered questions such as whether 5G features will require new types of devices, or whether smartphones will be the silver bullet for 5G. Consumers clearly state that they think smartphones are unlikely to be the sole solution for 5G.”

This latest Ericsson ConsumerLab study is based on 35,000 interviews with smartphone users aged 15 to 69, carried out in 22 different countries. The views of the participants are representative of almost 1 billion people. To gain a perspective on industry sentiment regarding the consumer value of 5G, a further 22 interviews were conducted with experts including academics as well as senior executives working for telecom operators, handset and chip manufacturers, start-ups and think tanks.

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Leadspace Announces “Leadspace On-Demand” to Extend It’s Leading B2B Customer Data Platform

Interest in Customer Data Platforms for B2B explodes, as data continues to proliferate in disconnected silos

Leadspace, the leading B2B Customer Data Platform (CDP), announced the launch of “Leadspace On-Demand” — a single control center that gives Sales and Marketing all the power to optimize, analyze, align and activate their data for more effective customer engagement.

“B2B sales and marketing teams wrestle with many challenges that can be traced back to their inability to get a handle on, and strategically use, customer data that lives across their siloed systems,” said Leadspace CEO Doug Bewsher. “With Leadspace On-Demand we’re giving control back to them with a single, easy-to-use interface for putting data to work in their strategic campaigns and efforts. Now they can better know, target and act on the right accounts and contacts, and more effectively grow their business.”

Leadspace On-Demand is a self-service application that will come standard for all Leadspace customers. It includes tools for managing data, visually exploring and analyzing account and persona data and scoring models, and creating segments for sales and marketing campaigns.

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Leadspace On-Demand is the latest in a series of products released by Leadspace over the last few months. Customers can also activate Leadspace data and intelligence directly into their sales and marketing systems and channels via Leadspace’s other products: Leadspace for Salesforce, Leadspace for Marketing Automation and Leadspace for Ads, or natively through APIs.

Of course, the effectiveness of a customer data platform is based on the strength of its underlying data. With 70+ sources including industry-leading firmographic, behavioral, technology, and intent data, Leadspace is uniquely capable of providing a single source of truth for B2B companies. The new tools that are part of Leadspace On-Demand will give them access to that unrivaled data and even more effective analytics and recommendations.

“You can’t be customer-obsessed if you aren’t confident in the accuracy and accessibility of your data,” explained Leadspace Founder and CTO Amnon Mishor. “To quote a recent Forrester report: ‘Data is now the foundation of all successful B2B marketing and sales.’ It’s the greatest business asset you have. And yet, so many marketers in particular are struggling daily with data management tasks.

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“Leadspace On-Demand is the central hub to tackle this problem. We’re giving marketing and sales ops people the power to automate and optimize the daily struggles they regularly face – whether that’s finding the right accounts for ABM, generating more qualified pipeline, or ensuring optimal database hygiene to better fuel all your processes.”

Innovative companies are embracing the concept of a B2B CDP, in particular to help drive their account-based marketing and sales efforts. At the SiriusDecisions Summit in Austin this week Leadspace will be hosting a case study session where CVENT will detail their data-driven ABM efforts and show how they improved lead prioritization and conversion rates. Leadspace also plans on offering the first live look at Leadspace On-Demand. If you miss that session or want a closer look, you’ll be able to see a live demo and sign up for a free data test in the Leadspace booth.

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Alphonso and PlaceIQ Enable Best-Of-Breed Location-Enabled TV Planning, Measurement, and Attribution

First-Of-Its-Kind Closed-Loop Attribution Solution Is Available in a Completely Self-Serve TV Campaign Analytics Dashboard; Provides Granular Analysis for Both National and Local TV Campaigns

Alphonso, the TV data company that marketers, broadcasters, and agencies go to for media planning, TV retargeting, measurement and attribution, and PlaceIQ, the company building a new model of consumer behavior with location data and insights, announced a partnership combining Alphonso’s large-scale TV viewership data with PlaceIQ’s location data, to enable best-in-class, location-aware TV planning, measurement, and closed-loop TV-to-visitation attribution.

Alphonso's TV-to-Visitation Attribution Dashboard for Broadcasters, Marketers and AgenciesUnlike other solutions, Alphonso’s closed-loop attribution is available in a fully self-serve TV campaign analytics dashboard, to give clients a clear picture of which networks, creatives, shows, and dayparts perform best at driving viewers from the living room into stores, restaurants, dealerships, or other places of business. Alphonso’s attribution is derived from the industry’s largest TV viewership data footprint spanning tens of millions of U.S. households, for granular analysis of both national and local TV campaigns.

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With the PlaceIQ location partnership, Alphonso now provides full-funnel attribution for its customers, from granular ad airings data, to reach and frequency with large-scale viewership data, to lift in brand awareness, to visits to websites and apps, and now all the way through to location visits. Alphonso TV-to-visitation attribution has particularly strong momentum in the automotive category, where brands work with Alphonso to understand the impact of their TV ads on dealership visitation.

“Working with PlaceIQ, Alphonso can now offer even more robust TV-to-visitation attribution, which is in strong demand across our clients in several verticals, particularly, automotive, retail, and QSR,” said Ashish Chordia, chief executive officer of Alphonso. “Combining the massive scale of our TV ad airings data with the industry’s leading location intelligence, our clients now have the best way to connect the dots between specific TV ad creatives and foot traffic into their businesses. And we are enabling this for both national and local TV campaigns, which no other company can offer at this scale.”

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In addition to closed-loop attribution, this partnership enables best-in-class location-aware media planning, enabling brands to better target prospective customers. A luxury carmaker, for example, can identify actual customers that visit its dealership locations (or even those of competitors) and use that audience set to inform their TV plan. More specifically, carmakers and their agencies can use Alphonso TV viewership analysis to develop media plans based on networks and dayparts where that audience is most frequently found on TV.

PlaceIQ’s location-intelligence platform ingests and processes billions of movement data points from over 200MM unique, anonymous devices to understand the places visited in their consumer journey. By matching this movement data with verified locations, PlaceIQ delivers anonymous visitation metrics to match high quality, real-world visitation metrics for a wide array of key marketing applications.

“We are thrilled to partner with Alphonso on their innovative suite of TV insights and analytics services,” said Nadya Kohl, executive vice president of business development and marketing at PlaceIQ. “The opportunity is massive, and now is the time to scale the TV ad business and address these needs to deliver and measure highly efficient audiences.”

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Dave Berman, Former President of ZOOM, Joins Raken’s Board of Directors

Growing construction field management software leader names tech industry’s No. 1 growth expert to governing board

Raken, the top-rated daily reporting app and field management solution for the construction industry, has named technology industry growth expert Dave Berman, the former president of video collaboration platform ZOOM, to its Board of Directors.

“Raken is in position to see extraordinary growth in the next few years, and I hope my experience and guidance can help them achieve that,” Berman said. “This company is meeting a unique need in the construction industry by prioritizing the needs of the field – a group that has been traditionally underserved by technology.”

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Berman has more than 25 years of experience in sales, marketing and support in the software technology industry. His innovative and effective sales strategies contributed to major growth for WebEx, RingCentral, Affectiva and ZOOM. Under Berman’s leadership, ZOOM experienced triple-digit annual growth in revenue, users and number of employees. Berman currently serves as a venture adviser for Spider Capital Partners, a seed-stage venture capital firm. Berman’s experience helping ZOOM build sales motion with individual users and expanding from there to the enterprise level is highly relevant: Raken is taking a similar approach, building a groundswell of adoption in the field and expanding from the bottom up.

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“Dave has had an incredible track record over the past couple decades, leading some of the fastest growing technology companies of our time. Needless to say, we’re excited to have him join our team,” said Raken CEO and founder Kyle Slager. “Our software is focused on the mobile workforce in construction – the hard-working men and women who work in the field. Raken makes their lives easier and helps them be more productive, and that in turn empowers the supervisors, project managers, executives and clients all the way up the ladder.”

Raken serves nearly 4,000 clients in 92 countries and has been utilized on over 350,000 projects. The cloud-based SaaS solution boosts productivity and safety by streamlining workflow processes such as daily reporting, time tracking and safety management. Raken recently introduced a Spanish-language option and an “offline mode” following a $10 million Series A funding round in 2018.

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Ian Green Joins 4Stop as Chief Sales Officer

4Stop (“FourStop GmbH”)a leading global KYB, KYC, compliance and fraud prevention provider, welcomes to their executive team Ian Green as their new chief sales officer.

Ingo Ernst, CEO, 4Stop says, “We’re excited to have Ian join our executive team during a period of significant growth and innovation. As we continuously look to enhance our technology and address significant global risk management challenges for businesses in multiple markets online, Ian’s expertise in sales execution will help us improve our value proposition and deliver relevant and actionable insights.”

Ian brings with him 17-plus years of experience driving revenue, profitability and performance. During this time, Ian has been extensively involved within the risk management industry and is very passionate about working with companies that drive innovations to secure our online environment.

At 4Stop, Ian will lead the global sales organisation, providing leadership, direction and an executive vision to ensure alignment with 4Stop’s financial and strategic goals. As a member of the senior executive team, Ian will also help to set the company’s strategy moving forward.

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“We are seeing a global market trend in the convergence between acquiring, payments, transaction fraud monitoring, KYC, AML, merchant on-boarding and authentication. Seamless, global, super-compliant, low-risk on-boarding is what many companies striving to achieve. The 4Stop team, platform technology and its aggregation strategy are already proving to be a winner in who manages the identity and anti-fraud aggregation space – with a fantastic team and single API connecting all endpoints of the customer identity, merchant on-boarding and anti-fraud workflow,” states Ian Green, CSO, 4Stop.

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“As many companies seek a single provider to manage all parts of the cycle, 4Stop will become a key part of the payments ecosystem and the central aggregation hub in the market. As an industry veteran of over 30 years in the business, consumer identity and the anti-fraud market, I’m very proud to be invited into the 4Stop team as CSO as it’s a wonderful opportunity for me to help develop and build the growth phase of a fantastic business,” Green says.

Previously, Ian held senior-level positions at an array of global identity and risk-centric businesses including vice president of global business development at Aristotle; co-founder, Veridu.com; sales director, 192.com; and global business development, Dun & Bradstreet. His experience includes defining and executing go-to-market strategies, building international sales teams and developing strategic partnerships.

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Retailers Tap Oracle AI to Better Serve Customers

Notebook-Based Data Science Tools Make It Easier for Retailers to Turn Their Data into a Powerful Business Asset

The competition in retail is fierce and great products alone are no longer enough. Whether shopping online or in person, customers want seamless, personalized shopping experiences. Helping retailers compete by making better use of their data, Oracle continues to weave significant artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities into its Retail Insights and Science Suite.

With new features, such as notebook-based data science tools, retailers can quickly deploy new data science-driven solutions to further engage and delight customers across channels. As an example, a retailer can build machine learning models within their Oracle Retail solutions to extract insights from images, sense demand from social media, or re-balance inventory to maximize productivity.

“Notebook-based solutions offer open source without the hassles,” according to Forrester. They leverage innovations in open source machine learning to enable data scientists to create models in their development languages of choice, such as Python or R. As such, they can speed new learnings that can both enhance the customer experience and bottom line results.

A leading Saudi Arabia pharmacy retailer, Nahdi Medical Company, applied these principles when they needed to create a new AI and machine learning model that could correlate customer engagement with marketing campaigns to identify and reward loyal customers.

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“By taking the innovative predictive models provided by Oracle Retail Science Platform Cloud Service and coupling them with our analytics intellectual property, we’ll be able to understand and predict our guests’ behavior which will give us the opportunities to serve them better,” said Dr. Ayman Abdalazem, head of business intelligence and analytics, Nahdi Medical Company. “Selecting a cloud platform for data science has enabled us to quickly implement the solution while minimizing technical debt and accelerating the value we extract for Nahdi Medical Company.”

Standout Features of the Oracle Retail Insights and Science Suite

With the Retail Science and Insights Suite business leaders and data scientists can deliver faster decisions with greater precision and innovations that drive tangible results.

“Most machine learning projects fall short on delivering tangible business benefits. Not because the innovation is misaligned with a business objective but because it is difficult to operationalize innovation,” said Jeff Warren, vice president, Oracle Retail. “The Retail Science Platform delivers the standardization and controls that enterprises need to accelerate their new offerings and swiftly integrate them into their business workflows. With the addition of notebook-based tools, our solution is a force to be reckoned with in predictive analytics and machine learning for the retail industry.”

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New advances include:

  • Notebook-based predictive analytics and machine learning solutions that give retailers the ability to bring innovations to market with faster speed and efficiency.
  • Customer Lifetime Value, RFM and Engagement Score are now available in the Retail Insights suite so that retailers can manage essential, modern retail KPIs associated with acquiring and retaining customers.
  • Affinity Analysis enhancements that enable retailers to drill down into critical information and answer questions such as, “How do affinities for a particular store compare to the region?” and “What were the halo effects of a particular event?”

“Retailers all know they need advanced analytics and retail science to drive their business forward, but they don’t all have the luxury of hiring on a data science team,” said Marc Koehler, solution director, Oracle Retail. “We continue to enhance Oracle Retail Insights and Science Suite to provide retailers with packaged insights and science applications, including Customer Insights Cloud Service and Offer Optimization Cloud Service, as well as the innovation workbench so that they can leverage best of both worlds.”

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Best Practice AI Is First UK AI Firm to Join the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council and Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Best Practice AI Ltd, the leading boutique AI management consultancy and publisher of the world’s leading AI use case library, announced that Simon Greenman, Co-Founder and Partner, has accepted the invitation to join the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council. Best Practice AI also announced that it has become the first UK AI company to join the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s AI programme. This invitation followed the firm’s contribution to the WEF’s Empowering AI Leadership Board Toolkit project.

“The speed and scale of technological change in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is creating challenges and opportunities,” said Kay Firth-Butterfield, Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the World Economic Forum. “Best Practice AI is a key part of the team on the Empowering AI Leadership project. Governments, and businesses need to understand how best to maximise the opportunities from the rise of AI whilst minimizing the negative possibilities of the technology. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with Best Practice AI in examining these pressing questions.”

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“I am honoured to be joining the AI Global Council to help provide strategic guidance on ways organisations can maximise the opportunities and minimise the risks from AI,” said Simon Greenman, Co-Founder and Partner of Best Practice AI. “We help our clients build sustainable competitive advantage from responsible AI and we are delighted that the WEF has recognised our work in this space.  We look forward to continuing working with the WEF to better equip leaders to identify and realise the benefits responsible AI can bring to their business and the world beyond.”

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“Best Practice AI has extensive corporate leadership experience driving digital and data transformation,” said Tim Gordon, Co-Founder and Partner at Best Practice AI. “This allows us to provide clear and realistic advice on how AI can be used to create competitive advantage. We were very proud to be chosen to work with the WEF alongside some of the giants of the industry. Working with the WEF helps us to support the widespread adoption of responsible AI.”

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