Domo, a cloud-based operating system for business, announced the Domo Marketing Suite, it includes two newly released apps — Digital 360 and Campaigns. Domo Marketing Suite users can set alerts, join data from other departments, share information and collaborate. Domo also announced Domo Stories, a new feature that enables users to create customized dashboard layouts and leverage data more effectively. The announcements were made at Domopalooza 2019, the company’s annual user conference.
ActiveCampaign Debuts Conversations
ActiveCampaign, a sales and marketing automation provider, announced the general availability of Conversations. The tool is designed to give businesses a way to connect with current and potential customers, collecting all the touchpoints in ActiveCampaign. Conversations are managed through one unified inbox, accessible online or through the mobile app.
Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Unomi™
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), a volunteer group of developers, stewards and incubators that includes more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, announced March 21 Apache Unomi™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).
Apache Unomi is a standards-based, Customer Data Platform (CDP). The project was originally developed at Jahia and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in October 2015. Serge Huber, vice president of Apache Unomi, said in a press release Unomi’s original goal was to ensure “true privacy by making the technologies handling customer data completely open source and independent.”
According to ASF officials, Apache Unomi can be used as a:
- Personalization service for a Web CMS.
- Analytics service for native mobile applications.
- Centralized profile management system with segmentation capabilities.
- Consent management hub.
Apache Unomi will be the industry’s first reference implementation of the upcoming OASIS CDP specification, according to officials. It was established by the OASIS CXS Technical Committee, which sets standards as a core technology for enabling the delivery of personalized user experiences. Apache Unomi is in use at organizations such as Al-Monitor, Altola, Jahia, Yupiik, and many others. Apache Unomi software is released under the Apache License v2.0.
Oracle Updates CX Suite at Conference
This week at its Modern Customer Experience (CX) conference in Las Vegas, Oracle announced several updates to the Oracle SaaS cloud suite, including a new artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning framework, integrations with Infinity, Data Cloud and DataFox, and new account-based marketing capabilities. A new partnership with Slack allows Oracle CX Cloud to leverage Slack’s app features to build and support integrations with sales and service applications. The new AI sales planning tools and task-based UX and adaptive search are designed to help sales planning and forecasting and narrow search criteria.
Conversocial Acquires Assist
Conversocial, a digital customer experience platform, is acquiring Assist, a messaging automation provider. Assist’s automation and chatbots will complement Conversocial’s unified approach to new service channels, according to company officials. As part of the acquisition, Assist’s CEO’s Shane Mac, who launched the company with Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens, will become Conversocial’s chief automation officer. Conversocial will retain all of Assist’s current staff and will immediately begin hiring for additional positions.
LinkedIn Launches Enhanced Targeting
LinkedIn introduced three new ways to help businesses target more of the right audiences from LinkedIn’s network of 610 million professionals: lookalike audiences, audience templates and the addition of Microsoft Bing search data to LinkedIn’s recently released interest targeting product. LinkedIn’s lookalike audiences combine customer traits with LinkedIn member and company data. LinkedIn users can now target based on a combination of their audience’s professional interests on LinkedIn and the professional topics and content their audience engages with through Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Salesforce Debuts Einstein AI and Quip for Service
Salesforce announced new AI and productivity solutions. The AI-powered recommendations, automated routing and embedded productivity and collaboration capabilities are designed to help customer service agents. The announcement includes Einstein Reply Recommendations (which uses natural language to suggest responses over chat and messaging) and Einstein Article Recommendations (machine learning that automatically recommends the best knowledge articles to agents).
Marketing Evolution Announces $26.1 Million in Growth Funding
Marketing Evolution, which provides marketing measurement and optimization solutions, announced $26.1 million in growth financing. The round was led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and saw continued participation from existing investors Insight Venture Partners and Zetta Venture Partners. This round brings the total invested to date to $50.7 million. In addition, Lindsay Luger, partner at EIP, will join Marketing Evolution’s board of directors.
CB Insights: AI Funding Soaring
Funding to AI startups is soaring, according to new data from CB Insights. Last year, VCs invested a record $9.3 billion into US AI startups, more than eight times the funding levels from five years ago ($1.1 billion in 2013). In 2018, the top three states for AI deals were California (48 percent of deals), New York (12 percent) and Massachusetts (9 percent). Some examples of companies that received funding include Butterfly Network (Connecticut, $350 million in total disclosed equity funding), Welltok (Colorado, $339 million) and InsideSales.com (Utah, $264 million).
People.ai Announces AI-Powered Data Collection
People.ai has debuted a revenue intelligence system that automates the capture of all contact and customer activity data, updates CRM and provides intelligence across multiple marketing and sales systems. It is designed to answer complex revenue questions and delivers intelligence such as which sequence of engaged buyer personas in an opportunity will maximize win rate or which engaged contacts, campaigns and sales activities were impactful in closing a deal, according to company officials.
LeanData Secures $27.5 Million
LeanData has secured $27.5 million in financing led by new investor Tenaya Capital. Another new investor, Industry Ventures, participated as well as existing investors Shasta Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Correlation Ventures. As part of the new financing, Tenaya Capital’s co-founder Brian Melton will join LeanData’s board of directors.
6sense Integrates with Salesforce Pardot
6sense, an account-based orchestration platform, has extended its relationship with Salesforce to include an all-new integration with Pardot, Salesforce’s marketing automation solution. It will combine marketing execution from Salesforce Pardot with the time-based predictions on prospect engagement from 6sense.