JSA Digital: September 2020

Wednesday 30 September 2020

September 2020 Martech Roundup 2: Google, Facebook Announce New Launches, Research Points To Healthy Digital Growth, and Key CMO Appointments Announced

September has been an exciting month for Martech. As we get closer to the holiday quarter, we have seen the general economic sentiment improve. Here are the top stories we have been tracking this month:

Top Martech Product Updates September 2020

Facebook Launches New Business Suite

The social media company unveiled new capabilities that allow business owners to manage posting on Facebook and Instagram at the same time, and manage and receive messages, notifications, and alerts in one place. The company plans to bring its other platforms under Facebook Business Suites such as Messenger and Whatsapp.

Google Releases Tools in Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager

The new launches are aimed at marketers looking to grow their brand through connected TV (CTV) advertising. The tool feature improves reach forecasting and measurement capabilities, better TV and video ad placements, and new solutions to reach engaged audiences on CTV.

Google will also support marketers with programmatic deals. Users will be able to include deals in their deduplicated reach estimate, which includes open option and YouTube. Media planners can also access Display & Video 360 to find out the top 50 most-watched ad-supported connected TV apps in the US, according to Comscore. The company is also making YouTube inventory available in Display & Video 360.

Marketers and media planners will also be able to find new connected TV viewers who share similarities with their target audience. Similar audiences can be used to extend reach across connected TV inventory sources in Display & Video 360.

Google has also introduced Unique Reach Reporting to include demographic insights for CTV supported devices. Brands can gain a more precise understanding of the impact of ads on CTVs and better articulate their contribution to the overall reach and frequency performance of digital advertising.

Connatix Introduces Social Stories for Publishers

Social Stories helps publishers generate a ‘stories’ format from their own Instagram content, embed it onsite, and monetize it with video advertising. Social Stories, now available on Connatix’s Playspace Platform, creates a direct connection with the publisher’s Instagram account to build self-updating stories for their website. The Story will showcase captions, likes, and comments, and publishers can automatically refresh the content every hour to keep stories fresh. Created stories can easily be monetized through Playspace, which was designed with an integrated ad server and exchange to scale content and maximize revenue.

Amperity 3.0 To Solve End-To-End Customer Data Challenges

Amperity launched the third generation of its Customer Data Platform (CDP), unveiling a new platform purpose-built to solve the spectrum of customer data challenges facing enterprise brands. While the CDP category has grown significantly in the past few years, most vendors have focused on point solutions, some serving IT or Analytics to organize web or mobile data, while others are serving marketers with a focus on data activation and personalization. In many instances, brands are cobbling together multiple CDPs to take control of their data.

Amperity 3.0 features three new products that help enterprises manage and leverage customer data more effectively – AmpID, Amp360, and AmpIQ. Danielle Iserlis, email marketing manager at Vince, told Toolbox, “Everything changed so rapidly this year and because of that, we were most interested in looking at how our customers had been performing during the pandemic. We were interested in taking a closer look at reactivation and acquisition of old and new customers, migration of price point and discount shopping, and impact around how the campaigns we launched during this period affected purchase behavior. Being able to pull customer segments and leverage predictive CLV, discount sensitivity, and affinity models have been a true benefit to our segmentation strategy. The usability of the program, from data extraction to audience and campaign building, has not just made it easy to pull customer lists and transfer them to our ESP, but has had a huge impact across multiple channels to create and analyze various data points.”

SpotX Launches New Programmatic Solutions To Scale Linear Addressable TV

The SpotX’s new solutions are, in part, built in support of the Project OAR open standard, which creates new addressable opportunities by replacing linear spots at the glass (smart TV) level. SpotX is also powering programmatic executions within traditional set-top boxes owned by multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), further helping to make addressable television available to programmers via programmatic at scale.

Pega Announces New AI Solution for Customer Engagement

Value Finder, Pega System’s new AI solution helps brands engage with their most underserved customers with messages and offers designed for their specific needs. Part of the Pega Customer Decision Hub, this capability expands the power of 1:1 customer engagement to ensure all customers get personalized, high-empathy treatment – not just the ‘premier’ customers that typically get the most attention.

The Pega Customer Decision Hub feature makes it easy to identify and fill critical customer engagement gaps by identifying underserved customers, filling engagement gaps, simplifying approvals across teams, and optimizing strategies before implementation.

Pega Customer Decision Hub serves as an always-on ‘brain’ providing centralized AI across all customer touchpoints, both inbound and outbound, to optimize every interaction and maximize customer value. Its predictive analytics and customer decision management enable organizations to surface unique insights and recommend the next best action in real-time during every step of the customer journey – from marketing to sales to customer service and retention. Pega Customer Decision Hub provides the responsible AI power across the unified Pega Infinity digital transformation software suite, optimizing customer engagement and operational efficiency from end to end.

ActiveCampaign Adds New Features To its Customer Experience Automation (CXA) Solution

The CXA for Service solution connects service and support interactions to the entire customer experience. CXA for Service uses the newly enhanced Conversations product to inform service and support interactions with customer data from the entire lifecycle. Armed with insights from past purchases, support tickets, email engagement, browsing history, and more, reps can deliver a new level of intelligent service and support.

Top Martech Research in September 2020

Merkle Releases Its 2020 Q3 Customer Engagement Report

The report explores the modern marketing technology platform, how it is implemented, and how marketers feel their platforms deliver engaging customer experiences. Merkle’s research also explores the balance of real-time versus relevant-time activations of data.

According to the report, marketers are generally happy with their existing platforms and latest purchases, but many may not be using them to their full potential. 78% of marketers say their current platforms are delivering the expected ROI, but 68% state they need to build custom platforms to implement their marketing strategies. The top two reasons respondents prefer custom-built platforms versus off-the-shelf platforms are scalability across the organization and more robust features and offerings. This reveals where marketers may be seeing gaps or inefficiencies in their ability to deliver the full customer experience.

The report also features case studies showcasing how a national paint retailer developed a modern marketing platform complete with rich third-party data, and how a national bank leveraged real-time decisioning to build a complex set of customer interactions over time and touchpoints.

Magna Releases Its Ad Spend Forecast for 2020

Digital advertising continues to be a bulwark during the pandemic. Although overall media owner ad revenue in the United States decreased by 7.2% during the first half of the year, digital ad sales grew by 5.7%, according to an updated forecast released by Magna.

Magna expects ad budgets to stabilize and recover in 2021, posting a 3.2% gain. Digital resilience, presidential elections, and entertainment advertising are expected to drive ad spend and digital media in 2020 and beyond.

Valassis Releases New Data on Influencer Marketing

The company released the results of its new consumer research, examining the increasing power of influencer marketing in today’s climate. Consumers’ changing patterns due to the pandemic and heightened awareness of social injustice and systemic inequality have resulted in new opportunities for brands to drive a connection with consumers.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in March, 21% of consumers have made an influencer-motivated purchase for the first time. Valassis’ recent Consumer Intel Report shows 35% of consumers made an unplanned purchase based on something they saw on social media as consumption of these channels has increased during the pandemic. Valassis surveyed 1,000 US consumers to gain insight into what motivates them to engage with social influencers, a market that is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2022.

Additionally, the heightened awareness around social injustice has impacted the way consumers engage with influencers. For example, 36% of influencer-following consumers say they are following a more diverse set of influencers than before, and 32% surveyed have purchased more products/services from businesses endorsed by influencers from different racial and cultural backgrounds.

A rigorous vetting process for influencers and content creation is critical to maximizing a brand’s effectiveness and reputation. According to the survey, 65% of consumers say they would stop following an influencer if they do or say something that does not align with their personal ethics and values. This is important for marketers as value alignment also contributes to loyalty and sales. Previous research shows 43% of consumers are more likely to buy products from companies whose values match their own.

Selligent’s Global Study Reveals New Shifts on Consumer Behavior

This year’s study finds seismic shifts in consumer behavior and changing expectations from brands amid the ongoing effects of the global pandemic. 75% of global consumers reported less work (reduced hours, reduced pay, laid off, etc.) due to COVID-19. As a result, a majority (60%) have modified purchases to focus on essential items, like food and safety products. When it comes to interactions with brands, 76% expect real-time email or mobile updates, while 81% value flexibility in returns or cancellations.

While it is clear that consumer spending habits are rapidly changing, data also shows opportunities for brands to cater to the ‘new normal’ of consumerism. Staying at home is a long-term expectation for most, with 58% of people prepared for a future of remote work, and 56% expecting to make new purchases to reflect the shift. They are buying more frequently as well, with 36% shopping online weekly, up from 28% before COVID-19.

Top Martech Partnership Announcements September 2020

Oracle and Sprinklr Join Hands To Improve Customer Service

New integrations between Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) and Sprinklr will help organizations deliver personalized and connected experiences for customers. The new integrations help marketers reach audiences on social media and other messaging channels at any point in the customer journey. They also help customer service professionals resolve service requests more efficiently.

Lotame and Amobee Partner for Global Social Audience Activation

Lotame and Amobee entered into a global social data partnership to drive customer insights and turn personas into addressable advertising, for enhanced audience targeting and activation across major social networks.

Amobee’s identity solution converts Lotame’s rich taxonomy of unique and privacy-compliant third-party audiences into audience segments that advertisers can use to enhance audience targeting across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter. This joint social audience offering is now available in all global markets across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Australia.

This partnership gives marketers access to the full suite of Lotame’s audience segments through the Amobee Advertising Platform, including demographic, interest, and intent data.

Zoox Smart Data and Kubient Announce New Partnership

Kubient and Zoox have struck a strategic partnership to allow advertisers to buy with vetted first-party, consumer-provided audience data, resulting in more efficient spending and maximum value connecting with premium audiences. The partnership enables real-time bidding programmatic access to and from demand platforms, brands, and agencies.

Qlik Deepens Its Partnership With Google Cloud

Qlik and Google launched a new joint offering focused on enabling customers to increase the value of their SAP data with Google BigQuery. Optimized to support SAP data on Google Cloud and Google BigQuery, and reinforced with Qlik’s new ‘SAP on Google Cloud Expertise’ designation, Google Cloud customers now have an integrated solution they can confidently deploy with Qlik Data Integration to help drive more use and value from all their data.

The newly launched solution from Qlik for Google Cloud enables customers to accelerate and simplify the delivery of SAP data for real-time analytics on BigQuery. The integrated solution provides customers an automated, real-time data pipeline through Qlik Data Integration to ingest and automate the delivery of analytics-ready SAP data into BigQuery – whether it is from legacy SAP environments, SAP HANA, or SAP application servers.

Selligent and Five9 Join Forces To Deliver Enhanced Customer Journeys

The partnership will see Selligent join the Five9 App Marketplace, combining the capabilities of Selligent Experience Cloud with the Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center for improved omnichannel customer experiences. By rooting evolving customer experiences in data collected throughout the customer journey, contact center agents are better able to assess needs and deliver resolutions that are timely, relevant and tailored to individual needs.

Top Martech Movers and Shakers September 2020

Facebook Appoints Alex Schultz as Global CMO

Following Antonio Lucio’s departure from Facebook last month, the social media conglomerate has named Alex Schultz as its new global CMO. Schultz previously held the role of VP of product growth and analytics in the company. In his new role, he will continue to report to Javier Olivan, Facebook’s vice president of growth.

Susan Somersille Johnson Named Chief Marketing Officer at Prudential

Susan Somersille Johnson will join the company as chief marketing officer, effective Oct. 5. Johnson will be responsible for leading the company’s global marketing and brand strategy and for helping to drive profitable growth for Prudential. Johnson joins Prudential from Truist Financial, the bank holding company formed in 2019 following the merger of SunTrust Bank and BB&T, where she was corporate executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

Former MAC Cosmetics Exec Joins Amazon Studios as CMO

Ukonwa Ojo joins the tech giant’s entertainment arm from MAC Cosmetics. She will replace Andrew Donkin, who has overseen marketing for Amazon originals and Prime Video since 2018. Ojo, who will lead originals and brand marketing for Amazon Studios and Prime Video, will start on Sept. 21 and report to Hopkins.

Ojo most recently served as global CMO at MAC, which she joined in December 2019. Prior to MAC, she spent three years at Coty, where she led marketing for brands including Covergirl and Sally Hansen. Ojo has also worked at General Mills.

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Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/september-2020-martech-roundup-2-google-facebook-announce-new-launches-research-points-to-healthy-digital-growth-and-key-cmo-appointments-announced/

COVID-19, Innovation Focal Points at EDGE 2020 Conference

Carey Smith, Parsons

The Government Business Executive Forum on Sept. 2 held the first segment of its EDGE 2020 conference, which focused on the impact of COVID-19 on travel, innovation and the future.

Combining in-person and virtual elements, the event kicked off with Parsons President and CEO Carey Smith, who stressed the gravity of the pandemic. She talked about cases, unemployment, economic issues and even deaths in a time of social, political and environmental turmoil. Then she moved to a more positive note, saying times like these are times for innovation and problem-solving.

“You need to disrupt, or you will be disrupted as you look toward the future,” she said.

Smith then highlighted how COVID-19 has changed people’s lives. The companies that shape the future are going to be the companies that survive going forward, she said.

According to Smith, Parsons looked first at safety and then shifted its focus to three major campaign areas in its work to develop COVID-safe solutions: integrated testing and screening, bio surveillance and digital transformation. As part of its campaigns, Parsons developed a new product, DetectWise, to help improve the screening and data collection process.

Smith emphasized that COVID-19 has changed the world, and even after the pandemic ends, things will be different. There have been changes in health, social events and other interactions at huge magnitudes that will likely shape the future, she said.

“Much like security changed after 9/11, health screening is going to become a part of the future, a part of our lives so people can be safe, healthy and secure and return back to what is going to be the new normal,” Smith said.

The next speaker was the Transportation Department’s Finch Fulton, deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy. He reiterated the challenges COVID-19 has introduced, but said these hurdles have led to new innovations across the federal government.

He went on to discuss the impacts of COVID-19 on business, particularly travel, saying the pandemic has drastically changed how people travel, with inner-city travel cut significantly, especially public transit.

As a result of these changes, DOT has focused on its “transportation system of tomorrow,” an innovative project that develops new travel technology modernizations. When COVID-19 hit, the project zeroed in on automated vehicles and drone integration efforts, Finch said. It came up with a plan to remove barriers to the development and integration of automated vehicles through testing and other projects. Additionally, it increased the number of drones involved in the mail delivery process during the pandemic as a way to deliver medical supplies.

Finch also talked about DOT initiatives focused on making travel more accessible. Working from home has highlighted how important accessibility is, he said, which led the agency to think about how it can better support people with disabilities with new travel technology.

“We have a real opportunity right now to shape the future that we want for a safer, more efficient and more inclusive transportation system,” Finch said.

The next speaker was Consumer Technology Association Executive Vice President Karen Chupka, who brought up the way COVID-19 has changed how we develop and adopt new technology. Before the pandemic, many would have never imagined a virtual conference with attendees from around the world, she said.

Chupka also emphasized COVID-19’s impact on medicine, which led to the rapid adoption of telemedicine, which wasn’t as widely used in the U.S. She then highlighted its effects on education and how people were forced into developing virtual school, which has resulted in some struggles but also some innovations.

Chupka then discussed the impact of COVID-19 on digital event technologies, which were rapidly adopted across the world. Although nothing can currently fully replicate the face-to-face experience, it has been and will continue to be an interesting challenge, she said.

Additionally, Chupka discussed the impact of COVID-19 on the hotel and airport industries, whose business partly comes from large conferences. There has been a very fast implementation of touchless systems, telemedicine, automated technologies, holograms and even robots as a result of the pandemic, she said.

“I think what we’re going to see in the future is that this isn’t going to go away,” she said. “There’s going to be a better mix that we’ll see in live events plus virtual that are tacked onto it.”

The next speaker was John Wagner, who recently retired from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He discussed the development of a touchless system to verify travelers and reduce congestion in airports. COVID-19 emphasized the need for this kind of technology, he said.

During the development process, Wagner and his team realized the key to building the most efficient version of this system was to focus on the travel experience, which requires travelers to repeatedly pull out their passports for verification while going through an airport.

To modernize this process, Wagner’s team created a passport photo database with the ability to search through photos of people flying that day for maximum accuracy and match them with photos taken by the system in an airport.

He then discussed how this system could be beneficial during the current pandemic and even after as the call for modernization continues.

“I think there is a lot of opportunity for innovation and ingenuity,” Wagner said. “And we’ll see what the future of travel looks like and how do we do that safely and securely.”

The next portion of the conference consisted of Parsons’ Sean Buckley and Jim Valerio demonstrating the DetectWise system Smith mentioned in her talk. They talked about the purpose of the device, which is to screen for any possible health conditions that could indicate COVID-19 during travel to make it easier to identify cases and contain the spread of the virus. This device uses facial recognition that looks at 36 facial points to determine a person’s temperature.

Buckley and Valerio also highlighted the device’s ability to facilitate telemedicine, which can connect a person showing any possible symptoms with a doctor to further screen the individual. It also uses technology to read hand gestures that move the cursor, making the device fully touchless.

Next, they talked about the data collection element of this device. DetectWise is able to collect and store data on each individual to make a personalized profile that provides a risk analytic for each person, making it easier to determine if someone needs to go through more intensive screening.

Lastly, they emphasized the importance of partnering with hospitals throughout the process to make their work more credible and useful in an applied context.

The conference ended with a thank-you message from Don Upson, founder and chairman of GBEF.

Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/covid-19-innovation-focal-points-at-edge-2020-conference/

Ecomm recharges digital payments, Technology News, ETtech

The mass adoption of ecommerce and boom in online shopping have been the single biggest push for digital payments during the Covid-19 pandemic, panellists at an ET webinar said, as restrictions on physical businesses forced Indian consumers to redefine their spending behaviour.

“I cannot pass this point without highlighting the boom in e-commerce,” said Praveena Rai, COO of digital payments railroad NPCI, at The Economic Times-Back to Business Dialogues – The future of digital banking and payments in a post-pandemic world.

“The growth is far more prominent on ecommerce during Unlock than before pre-pandemic and during the first phase of lockdown. Here, the opportunity is in conversion of Cash on Delivery (COD) to Digital on Delivery. COD was an animal we were trying to tame, and it seems that its day has finally come,” Rai said.

Industry executives said they saw this as a huge opportunity due to the unprecedented surge in first-time users and merchants adopting digital modes. Most retail payment channels, including the Unified Payments Interface, clocked record volumes in July and August.

This sort of consumer behaviour would become irreversible, the executives said, adding that it was integral to ensure that consumers were protected, more than ever.

“It is often not highlighted as it’s not as fashionable as some of the other points. It’s on the notion of how cyber security, data privacy and online fraud risks are perceived,” said TR Ramachandran, group country head, India and South Asia, Visa Inc.

“We have to be responsible about this. It’s a very lethal combination for fraudsters to insert themselves from a phishing and vishing attack perspective,” he added.

Ecomm recharges digital payments
The Economic Times’ Back to Business panel is part of back-to-back webinars featuring industry leaders deliberating on economic recovery in a post-pandemic world. The panel was moderated by Mihir Gandhi, partner and leader, payments transformation at PwC, with participation from NPCI’s Rai, Visa’s Ramachandran, PhonePe cofounder & CEO Sameer Nigam and SBI’s deputy managing director (strategy) and chief digital officer, SBI, Ravindra Pandey.

The panellists held detailed discussions on four broad themes, including the future of transit payments and regulatory impetus by the central bank to fast-track digital payments.

“RBI wants offline payments for tier 10 and beyond villages. For bankers, the challenge is how to ring-fence fraud and risk management systems,” said Pandey. “There has to be quid pro quo between risk and business. The regulator must provide some margin to manage risks.”

The industry leaders also provided insights on what was needed to bring the next billion transactions onto digital channels and identified transit as a segment that provides massive cash-displacement opportunity.

“When the market recovers, it would be amazing if we could figure a way to do queue busting. When I was younger, I remember the queues to get a ticket or monthly pass on the Mumbai Western Line,” said Nigam of PhonePe.

Nigam was also vocal on the implications of the upcoming new umbrella entities (NUEs) envisaged by the Reserve Bank of India.

“I don’t know if we need our own NUE. We have to solve for fraud and we need to open up the market…More NUEs may fragment the ecosystem at the network level. There is a lack of clarity on what it solves,” he said.

Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/ecomm-recharges-digital-payments-technology-news-ettech/

Astronaut Artificial Intelligence Monitors Patients at Home – NASA

Astronaut Artificial Intelligence Monitors Patients at Home NASA

Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/astronaut-artificial-intelligence-monitors-patients-at-home-nasa/

TigerGraph Offers Free Graph Database for On-Prem Analysis

(ra2 studio/Shutterstock)

TigerGraph today rolled out a new deal that allows customers to store up to 50 GB of data in a distributed graph database running on-premise, matching what it already offered in the cloud. The company also welcomed more than 3,500 attendees to its inaugural Graph + AI World conference, which included keynotes from customers like Jaguar Land Rover and UnitedHealth.

Banks and healthcare companies have some of the most compelling use cases for graph analytics, including anti-money laundering (AML) and drug discovery. However, these companies are also among the least able to take advantage of cloud-based graph offerings, such as TigerGraph Cloud, due to stringent data regulations.

That’s the reasoning that went behind TigerGraph’s announcement today to give away copies of TigerGraph Enterprise Edition, its full-featured graph database. The software is limited to storing up 50 GB of data, which is enough for prospects to see if the solution will work for them, says Todd Blaschka, TigerGraph’s COO.

“There are some customers that cannot move their data to the cloud due to sensitivity restrictions,” Blaschka says. “Developers have been using [a free version] that is designed for a single machine, but they’ve been saying to us, hey we want what is also available on TigerGraph Cloud. Can you make it available?”

TigerGraph unveiled its cloud offering two years ago, and made it generally available last year. When it launched on AWS a year ago, the SaaS offering was free for databases up to 750 GB. The cloud offering has been very popular, and today has more than 2,000 users, Blaschka says.

The cloud offering is the leading vehicle for getting TigerGraph into the hands of prospective customers, says Guarav Desphande, vice president of marketing for TigerGraph.

Graph databases make sense of connected data (Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock)

“If you’re a cloud customer, no problem. Come to TigerGraph Cloud, and use the free tier to build applications,” Depshande says. “We provide open source graph algorithm library. We provide graph studio, which is the best data science GUI for graph databases for connected data analyses. And then we have partners providing additional applications and starter kits that provide you with the baseline schema, a set of series, and the workflow–all out of the box, all at our cost.”

TigerGraph doesn’t charge for compute or storage in the cloud offering, and now, with the free version of TigerGraph Enterprise, it’s giving customers the same opportunity on-prem. “You can build application in the cloud or on premise,” Desphande says. “If you see the value after you get started, please pay us something–we’re a tiny startup company. We need to pay our bills also.”

TigerGraph was founded several years ago by Yu Xu, a distributed systems expert who previously worked at Teradata and Twitter, to build what he terms a “third generation” graph database that’s designed from the get-go to run in a distributed manner. Even with only 50 GB in the free version, customers can take advantage of TigerGraph’s distributed nature to process the data in a cluster, bolstering performance.

The free version of TigerGraph Enterprise isn’t limited to development or test use cases, and can be used in a production setting. Many problems can be tackled with 50 GB, which is the equivalent of 150 GB on competing graph databases due to the way they tend to “blow up” data, Deshpande says. The database is capable of scaling up to support hundreds of terabytes of data across a cluster.

In addition to running as an operational database, TigerGraph can be used by data scientists to model data using built-in graph algorithms. Those algorithms can very quickly thanks to a partnership the Redwood City, California company recently formed with Xilinx, a provider of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

“Hardware-accelerated machine learning is another top use case where people are combining TigerGraph with other hardware like Xiliinx’s FPGA to accelerate community detection” of money laundering and fraud rings, Deshpande says.

This week also marked the company’s first foray into virtual conferences. TigerGraph is the host of Graph + AI World and its main sponsor, but the idea is to build the conference into a place for the graph database and AI communities to come together to share ideas.

Among the speakers planned for the event are Edward Sverdlin, a vice president at UnitedHealth Group, which used TigerGraph to analyze medical codes for potential COVID-19 patients; and Harry Powell, the director of data and analytics at Jaguar Land Rover, which used TigerGraph to accelerate supply chain planning operations that were disrupted due to the pandemic.

So many people signed up for Graph + AI World that TigerGraph was forced to add an extra day. All told, the event featured one day or tutorials and two days of business and technical keynotes. The event is also open to TigerGraph’s competitors, Blaschka says.

“We would love to have more graph companies participate and share what they’re doing,” he tells Datanami. “We embrace it. We want to drive the industry forward as a whole, just like Databricks is doing with Spark + AI Summit. We’re just the ones organizing it.”

TigerGraph Launches Cloud Database on AWS

TigerGraph Emerges with Native Parallel Graph Database

Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/tigergraph-offers-free-graph-database-for-on-prem-analysis/

Democrats debut Spanish ads to rally Hispanic vote for Biden

Your Local Election Headquarters

Commercials harp on family themes and how Latinos are essential workers

by: Julian Resendiz

Posted: Sep 30, 2020 / 05:37 AM CDT / Updated: Sep 30, 2020 / 05:37 AM CDT

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Texas Democrats say they’re making “unprecedented” efforts to get Latino voters to help them flip the state in this presidential election.

The strategy includes reaching out to 300,000 Hispanics daily through email, telephone and text messages and launching a new Spanish-only digital ad called “Mi hija” (My daughter).

“It’s a dialogue between a daughter and her mother about the importance of voting. It’s in Spanish and, in a very emotional way, highlights conversations that we are already having in our living rooms, at the dining table with our moms, our dads, our aunts about how important this election is and how it will affect us,” said state Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas.

Those conversations often revolve around how President’s Trump immigration policies and lack of leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic have negatively affected Latino communities, Democratic elected officials said Tuesday in a Zoom call prior to the first Trump-Biden televised debate.

Many have relatives who are first-generation immigrants and haven’t forgotten how Trump called migrants “criminals and rapists” during the last campaign, the Democrats said. They also fear a second Trump presidency could spell the end of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and asylum programs.

“He has attacked us. He has blamed us for all sorts of things. He has called us illegals and criminals, hasn’t spoken to us with the respect we deserve as essential workers and entrepreneurs,” Anchia said, adding he’s confident that Biden will “change the chip” of the conversation and treat Hispanics with respect.

A digital and television ad — “Somos alguien” (We are somebody) — with a slightly different message will air in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. One called “Mantienen nuestro país funcionando (They keep our country running) will be shared on digital platforms in Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez Jr., D-Texas, said his South Texas district has been hit disproportionately by the coronavirus and he blames that on a poor federal response.

“Seventeen-hundred people have died in a district of 800,000 people. (The district) is 3% of the state’s population but we have 10% of the deaths. The governor and the president left us unprotected and that led to loss of life,” Gonzalez said.

Both lawmakers and U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, urged Latinos to register to vote by Oct. 5, if they haven’t done so already. And they called on them to not only go vote on Nov. 3, but also take their eligible friends and family members to the polls – while observing applicable COVID-19 protocols.

“We need to become a big voting wave, exercise our electoral power because, until we do, we won’t have the respect that we deserve,” Gonzalez said. “We can talk all we want, but until we vote, we won’t get respect.”

Visit the BorderReport.com homepage for the latest exclusive stories and breaking news about issues along the United States-Mexico border.

Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/democrats-debut-spanish-ads-to-rally-hispanic-vote-for-biden-3/

Twilio Arms Businesses for the Great Digital Acceleration at SIGNAL 2020

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SIGNAL 2020 — Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the leading cloud communications platform, today announced platform enhancements that help fast forward companies’ digital acceleration. Recent research from Twilio found that 97% of enterprises have accelerated their digital transformation efforts in response to COVID-19 and their digital communications strategy have sped up by an average of six years. Twilio has seen increases in demand, powering nearly one trillion human interactions in the past year, as enterprises across every industry turn to the platform to deliver the essential engagement experiences they need to reach their customers.

“Faced with an entirely new reality over the past six months, enterprises have been forced to accelerate their digital transformation plans to serve their customers,” said Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio. “Many are turning to Twilio because the platform delivers three things that have become immediately essential — digital engagement, software agility, and cloud scale. We’re excited to announce new products at SIGNAL that allow enterprises to build the solutions that will become the standard for customer engagement in the future.”

“Communication is critical to keep travelers informed throughout their journey with Delta, but it’s even more important as we navigate COVID-19,” said Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines. “Twilio has enabled us to communicate updates and new standards to our 200 million customers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While our people continue to deliver best-in-class service, technology helps us communicate and continue to operate safely, comfortably and at scale.”

Today at SIGNAL, Twilio announced:

New digital engagement channels that power the shift from physical to digital

Industries that have historically relied on in-person experiences to build brand loyalty are turning to digital engagement channels to create the same one-on-one connection online. Twilio’s sent and received messages nearly doubled in the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2019. During the same period, developers using Twilio to access the WhatsApp Business API more than doubled. In May 2020, Twilio SendGrid surpassed three trillion processed emails, sending an average of 2.5 billion emails per day this year.

Twilio’s research found that 95% of businesses said they expect their organization to find new ways of engaging customers as a result of COVID-19 with 92% of organizations looking to expand their digital communication channels. Perhaps no digital channel has been accelerated by this transition as much as real-time video. In the early days of the pandemic, companies rushed to deploy short-term emergency solutions to enable video. Now they are looking to developers to build long term video solutions that are more tailored and integrated for optimal user experience, fueling a more than 500% increase in daily Twilio Video usage since COVID-19 hit.

Traditionally millions of developers have turned to WebRTC as an open framework to build new video use cases, only to struggle with the ongoing time and cost to build all the services and infrastructure that support WebRTC applications. To revolutionize this, Twilio Video launched Twilio Video Web RTC Go, a free toolkit that eliminates the complexity of building on top of WebRTC, enabling developers and companies to simply and quickly create and launch one-to-one video applications. Learn more about Twilio Video WebRTC Go, now available here.

Modern contact center and mobile innovation that enables the remote, agile workforce

Today’s socially distant world demands that organizations design their workforces to be able to serve customers under any circumstances from anywhere. Businesses have seen no greater acceleration to digital than in the contact center where organizations needed to quickly move to the cloud to support remote work. Twilio’s cloud contact center, Twilio Flex is powering this agile workforce movement.

Twilio Flex, which calls Lyft, Marks & Spencer and Shopify customers, has added more than 100 new features since its launch on the SIGNAL stage in 2018. Today it expands the capability of its platform with the announcement of the Twilio Flex Ecosystem — giving organizations access to more than 30 validated partner solutions from partners such as Google, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Calabrio to help businesses accelerate their contact center transformations. Twilio also recently announced the company’s first Global Systems Integrator partnership with Deloitte Digital.

Another core driver of the agile workforce are the 80% of the global workforce who are deskless. Many of these field workers use their own personal devices to communicate with customers — introducing privacy concerns and making it difficult for businesses to keep a record of communication with their customers.

To serve this decentralized workforce, Twilio today announced Twilio Frontline — a mobile application that allows field workers to seamlessly and securely engage directly with customers from their personal devices. The app routes incoming and outgoing customer conversations from WhatsApp, SMS/MMS, and web chat with more channels on the horizon, to a single mobile app on an available employee’s personal device. As a mobile app, Twilio Frontline gives every employee the communication tools they need to efficiently answer questions, solve problems, and build customer relationships without requiring businesses to develop their own application. Learn more about the Frontline private beta here.

Customer intelligence that fuels the future of customer engagement

Every business is looking to better understand their customers, yet building a single view of a customer’s journey is difficult as the data is often spread out across different products and systems and accessed through disparate interfaces and formats. Twilio’s platform presents businesses with a unique purview across all channels to break down silos and deliver customer intelligence that leverages multi-channel customer interaction data — ultimately providing one single view of the customer experience.

Today at SIGNAL, Twilio introduced Event Streams — a single API that aggregates data from all Twilio powered experiences — Voice, SMS, Super SIM, TaskRouter, and other services — enabling real time monitoring and reporting across every communication channel. This is the first step in Twilio’s efforts to optimize how developers can access, understand, and consume the highly valuable customer interaction data from events that the Twilio platform generates to improve engagement and business outcomes. Click here to learn more about the Event Streams private beta.

About Twilio

Millions of developers around the world have used Twilio to unlock the magic of communications to improve any human experience. Twilio has democratized communications channels like voice, text, chat, video, and email by virtualizing the world’s communications infrastructure through APIs that are simple enough for any developer to use, yet robust enough to power the world’s most demanding applications. By making communications a part of every software developer’s toolkit, Twilio is enabling innovators across every industry — from emerging leaders to the world’s largest organizations — to reinvent how companies engage with their customers.

Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/twilio-arms-businesses-for-the-great-digital-acceleration-at-signal-2020/

Roofers find new digital marketing partner in Roofer Ad Experts – Press Release

Roofer Ad Experts is helping roofers to generate a steady flow of leads every month with a proven and comprehensive suite of digital marketing campaigns.

Fortson, GA – September 30, 2020 – Roofer Ad Experts has reportedly emerged as the go-to digital marketing partner for roofers of late. The rising digital marketing company has already created waves all over the internet for its proven digital marketing system which has shown to help roofers generate 20+ new customers every month. Roofer Ad Experts has also earned approval from none other than Mr. Wonderful for its result-driven marketing strategies.

Per the statements of the company key person Tommy Nguyen, Roofer Ad Experts support clients with a fully outsourced expert marketing that doesn’t break the bank.

“Bank on us as your absolute digital marketing partner when you are struggling to find quality leads for your roofing projects. Our team has been helping roofers to generate steady leads for long and we do know the time-tested strategies to promote your roofing brand and generate leads. We believe in real results and we will support you with the exact proven strategies that would keep your business ahead in the competition and attract new customers for you consistently”, stated Mr. Nguyen.

The company has developed a comprehensive suite of digital marketing system comprising a series of done-for-you marketing campaigns. The system covers –

Done-for-you brand awareness campaign to spread the word about client-brand

Done-for-you lead generation campaign to kick-start sales conversions

Customized customer attraction funnel (built as per specific needs of the business) to convert traffic into prospective leads

Booking of sales appointments booked right into client’s company calendar

Auto updating of leads database that will help to keep tab on client’s all new sales opportunities

“Our team will shoulder all the leg work for marketing and promotion on your part and you will only need to implement our proven pre-made solutions to scale up your brand. This way, you will get more time to concentrate on other important aspects of your roofing business”, added Mr. Nguyen.

(In Frame: Tommy Nguyen)

Roofer Ad Experts has assured to build and manage custom integrations for roofer clients to ensure a smooth operation of all the systems. Roofers signing up for the marketing system will receive instant notifications from the company when someone becomes a lead or books an appointment with them.

A major USP of Roofing Ad Experts lies in their customized service approach. The company builds custom marketing plans to help roofer clients reach their specific company goals at their best.

“We have been working with roofers for long and we do acknowledge each roofing company comes with its own specific promotion or marketing needs. Thus, unlike regular marketing companies that mostly follow a generic approach, we make sure to proceed with each project with a personalized plan- tailored as per our client’s particular needs. Your growth is important to us and we personalize your lead generation journey so that you can map out the exact route needed for your success.”

For more information, please visit https://rooferadexperts.com

Media Contact
Company Name: Roofer Ad Experts
Contact Person: Tommy Nguyen
Email: Send Email
Country: United States
Website: https://rooferadexperts.com

Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/roofers-find-new-digital-marketing-partner-in-roofer-ad-experts-press-release/

Contentstack Creates Engaging Augmented Reality Prototype for Retail Industry in Just 4 Weeks

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Contentstack, the leading Content Experience Platform (CXP), today announced it has partnered with Valtech, a Contentstack Catalyst, to create an augmented reality (AR) proof of concept for the retail industry. The team used readily available enterprise-grade and open source technology to build an AR app in just four weeks. The approach demonstrates how quickly any business can leverage existing technology to build a working AR experience.

The retail industry is having to quickly adapt during the COVID pandemic to reduce in-person interactions. Using augmented reality, the Contentstack prototype helps retailers and brands to create touchless, engaging self-service experiences. Retailers using AR technology in this way can better attract customers to brick-and-mortar stores and increase foot traffic.

“This app showcases how fast and easy it is to innovate with AR — it isn’t scary or difficult and we have the blueprint,” said Sonja Kotrotsos, Head of Product Marketing for Contentstack. “Rolling out immersive content experiences is a differentiator for brands. Rather than simply relying on text and video to tell their stories, brands and retailers can use emerging technologies to build engaging, dynamic content-rich experiences that tell those stories in new, more digestible ways. We are helping businesses develop a digital landscape that is dynamic, easily changeable and extensible to fit with emerging technologies like AR.”

Using microservices, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and headless (MACH) technologies, Contentstack and Valtech built a prototype application that simulates using web-based AR within an in-store shopping experience for a skincare product category, specifically serums. In the first scenario, the app demonstrates the point of sale (POS) experience, selecting serums from a range of available options, with information on ingredients and product reviews. At this stage, a personalized recommendation can be offered to the customer based on integrations with influencer marketing programs or via a pre-existing profile, such as purchase history or personal skincare goals.

The next scenario highlights the “first use” experience. Once the customer has purchased the serum, they are able to access the same AR application at home to receive usage instructions. This could include how much to use, at which step in the routine, how frequently and any information on contraindications based on their existing skincare regimen.

The last scenario demonstrates how customers can use the same AR application after using the product for a period of time. Personalized recommendations can be given to adjust use, offer repurchase, suggest a different product (e.g. concentration of active ingredients) or propose complementary products. Customers can also leave a review at this stage, which is incorporated into the first scenario.

“This proof of concept showed how any business can use Contentstack’s headless content management system to create an AR application,” said Pascal Lagarde, Vice President of Commerce at Valtech. “Robust workflows, easy internationalization and Contenstack’s tremendous capability for personalization through simple integrations made it seamless for our team to build an amazing AR app for the beauty industry — an industry rife with complex information that needs to be easily understood and personalized to the customer. This proof of concept shows how brands can support an in-store shopping experience, making it easier to convey information to consumers, and for customers to engage in a way that’s relevant to their interests.”

Contentstack and Valtech will be sharing this prototype with the public during a session entitled “New Frontiers of Augmented Reality for the Retail Enterprise” at the prestigious The Next Web Conference on Friday, Oct. 2 at 10:45 a.m. EDT.

About Valtech
Valtech is a global business transformation agency delivering innovation with a purpose. We enable clients to anticipate tomorrow’s trends and connect more directly with consumers across their digital touch points while optimizing time-to-market and ROI. We are a network of more than 3000 innovators, design thinkers, marketers, creatives and developers spanning 5 continents with offices in 15 countries (USA, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Brazil, China, India, Singapore, Argentina, Ukraine). With a renowned commitment to innovation and agility, Valtech creates unprecedented success for our Global 50 clients while optimizing time-to-market and ROI. For more information, visit www.valtech.com.

About Contentstack
Contentstack combines the best of Content Management System (CMS) and Digital Experience Platform (DXP) technology. It enables enterprises to manage content across all digital channels and create inimitable digital experiences. Renowned for earning the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, Contentstack pioneered the headless CMS category and combines content infrastructure with the industry’s #1 integration capabilities to deliver a best-in-class Content Experience Platform (CXP). The preferred API-first CMS for SAP customers, Contentstack was designed from the ground up for large-scale, complex, and mission-critical deployments. Contentstack is a founding member of the MACH Alliance, an industry organization that advocates for an open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem that is Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless. For more information, visit http://www.contentstack.com.

Media Contacts:
Cathy Summers
Summers PR for Contentstack
[email protected]
415-483-0480

SOURCE Contentstack

Lessons in preparation: how Queensland’s digital transformation headaches caused $540 million in late payments

Queensland’s new IT platform quickly became a high-profile example of the pitfalls of implementing new systems, when, several weeks after going live, millions of dollars had flowed out of the department in errant invoice payments.

Last year, Queensland’s Department of Health went live with a replacement for its 22-year-old finance and materials management ICT platform.

The program, nearly four years in the making under a $105 million budget, was billed as an opportunity to modernise the business, finance and logistics systems for the state’s hospitals and health services under a new SAP product called S/4HANA.

But the project quickly became a high-profile example of the pitfalls of implementing new ICT systems, when, several weeks after going live last August, it emerged millions of dollars had flowed out of the department in errant invoice payments.

By the time project managers had identified the issue, a range of human and technical errors caused by the implementation had seen more than 13,000 duplicate invoices filed and paid across the state, totalling $6.5 million in over payments.

A little over 12 months later, a report filed by Queensland’s Audit Office about the program has found the department has started to recover the duplicate payments, after the systems issues led to a sizeable backlog in vendor invoices, causing $540 million in supplier invoices to be paid late.

And while significant efforts were made to transition over to the new system since it went live, 14 of Queensland’s 16 hospital and health service units reported the platform did not change their workflow as anticipated in the months after its release — not exactly a stellar endorsement.

“Entities did not properly understand the new system processes, nor did they fully appreciate the need to re engineer their business processes to fit the system,” auditors said of the implementation period.

There are no shortage of lessons for the broader public sector in the S/4HANA transition, and they’re particularly timely; over the next three years, departments and agencies at the commonwealth and state levels will be under significant pressure to undertake their own digital transformation programs.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed as much last week when he pledged commonwealth entities would be required to move to e-invoicing by midway through 2022 at the latest, while the independent APS review handed down late last year found many systems across the APS are grossly outdated.

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They estimated $400-$900 million a year in new investment will be required to match private sector benchmarks for digital transformation, which by any measure is a lot of new systems.

Digital transformation and you: how failures to prepare led Queensland astray

With this in mind, Queensland’s recent experience is pertinent, and it all starts with preparation.

Broadly, auditors identified a set of key problems in Queensland’s implementation of S/4HANA:

Before the system went live, entities reported they were ready when they really weren’t;
Outstanding deficiencies in the processes required to enable the new software were not rectified before launch; and
Technical problems once S/4HANA did go-live created significant performance issues, including outages, that eventually led to a re-platforming of the system.

The issues were so severe that, within three months of the new platform being implemented, Queensland health had racked up $3.1 million in un-budgeted costs related to hiring more staff, addressing training shortfalls, and implementing manual workarounds to inventory and accounts issues.

“The post go-live experience showed that Queensland Health underestimated the compounding delivery risks,” auditors found.

A hundred gloves turn into one: how human failures drove implementation headaches

While auditors identified technical issues that eventually forced the department to double the memory and processing capacity of the new platform, the majority of the problems identified with the implementation arose from lacklustre systems training and failures in the development of human processes.

In other words, as has been identified in prior ICT implementation failures, issues with the technology itself paled in comparison to a vast array of human errors.

Namely, it has become clear that despite having delayed the go-live date twice in the lead up to August 2019, Queensland Health was not ready to implement the new system when it did.

This was largely because stakeholders responsible for reporting to senior executives had broadly professed their readiness in the months leading up to the implementation date, when in fact these assurances were caveated a total of 128 times across 19 separate entities.

“Chief executives or senior responsible executives endorsed their entities’ readiness to go live, despite none of them being fully ready,” auditors found.

This would turn out to have adverse consequences, as significant shortcomings in user training about the new platform –remember Queensland Health had been using its last system for 22-years — created massive headaches when the program did go live.

For example, changes in the way S/4HANA recorded stock orders versus the old system led staff to make sizeable errors in orders for personal protective equipment, whereby staff thought they were ordering one box of 100 gloves, but the new platform tried to deliver a single glove.

“Change management did not adequately teach and inform staff how the system would operate,” auditors found.

Other issues with new warehouse scanners and additional controls around stock management that were present in the new system but not the old one forced 15 of Queensland’s 16 health service entities to develop manual workarounds in the months after the system went live, which is really the opposite of the desired outcome.

Audit: senior executives must be responsible for whole-of-system projects

In recommendations to the department, auditors pointed to project governance and accountability as the genesis of many of these issues, recognising that implementing ICT projects at scale requires ownership to be taken over readiness well ahead of time.

They said accountability frameworks must ensure shared responsibility for project delivery across:

Completing project readiness activities in a timely manner and to a specified quality;
Understanding change implications to their entities and updating local guidance; and
Correctly identifying user roles and ensuring the right staff are trained at the right time.

Learnings from training in complex systems at scale: it pays to be over-prepared

One of the more significant findings that auditors made was that training in the S/4HANA system was broadly inadequate across Queensland Health prior to go-live.

State-wide, S/4HANA’s training completion rate was just 39% in the weeks leading into system implementation, while only one-in-two staff was completing instructor-led learning programs.

Crucially, the majority of superusers who, in a matter of months, were supposed to be in positions of workplace authority about the new platform, did not attend any training sessions.

“The majority of users did not attend sufficient training prior to go-live; some found the training not as useful as it could be after reflecting on their post go-live experience,” auditors found.

Queensland’s experience highlights the difficulty in rolling out complex training programs at scale, with a total of 23,000 role-based training places offered across 30 different modules.

Staff reported training programs were often overly theoretical, and did not place enough emphasis on how S/4HANA would change work practices in their own teams; and while there were some good examples identified of more localised training, staff reported the information they were taught turned out to be less relevant to their eventual post implementation experience.

While this is undoubtedly a difficult dilemma, a chicken-and-egg sort of situation, auditors reported that entities felt as though the criteria for assessing whether staff had understood what they had been taught was lacking.

This led to over confidence among decision makers higher up the chain that was exposed when the system did finally go live.

“Most entities did not understand the system processes well enough to re-engineer critical local processes to fit the new system,” auditors found.

Queensland Health has been undertaking its own reviews to learn from the implementation, as Director-General John Wakefield explained in his response to the auditor’s report.

“I note that the report represents a point in time and that Queensland Health has made significant inroads in addressing its findings,” he said.

“I reaffirm that S/4HANA has provided Queensland Health with comprehensive procurement and supply chain data that has been instrumental to the COVID-19 response, and that during the implementation there was no impact on patient care.”

The full auditors report can be accessed here.

Content Originally Published by Google.

source https://blog.jsa.digital/index.php/2020/09/30/lessons-in-preparation-how-queenslands-digital-transformation-headaches-caused-540-million-in-late-payments/

Wednesday 30 September 2020

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Digital transformation and you: how failures to prepare led Queensland astray

A hundred gloves turn into one: how human failures drove implementation headaches

Audit: senior executives must be responsible for whole-of-system projects

Learnings from training in complex systems at scale: it pays to be over-prepared