Tag: Platforms

Singapore – Along with the peak season of summer 2023, consumers are turning to their mobile devices more than ever before for travel and transportation needs, increasing year-over-year usage by 14%, which is more than three times the total from the summer of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report by mobile analytics provider data.ai.

Data from the report mainly suggests that time spent in travel apps reached new heights with time spent on Android phones surpassing four billion hours, or an average of more than one billion hours per month, between May and August 2023.

Interestingly, the increase in time spent between 2022 and 2023 came mostly from apps used for more day-to-day travel, not vacations. Transportation apps and rail & coach booking apps had significant increases in time spent in the summer 2023 season.

Meanwhile, apps related to vacation and business travel like integrated travel service, hotel booking, and airline apps, were able to mostly maintain the gains seen from the previous year, with time spent in these apps notably surging in the summer of 2022 with consumers planning trips for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

The report also listed the travel and transportation apps that saw the most time spent in the summer of 2023, with transportation apps being prominent in the list with apps such as Where is my Train, inDrive, and Grab Driver being top breakout apps of the season. 

However, apps outside of the transportation subgenre such as Flightradar24, United Airlines, Trainline, and Jet2 managed to reach the top breakout rankings in many key markets like the US and the UK. 

“The trend seen in the results suggests that this is not just a one-off spike following the pent-up demand after pandemic-related travel restrictions, and that these travel and transportation apps will continue to see positive growth, especially during peak travel seasons,” data.ai said in a press statement.

Australia – Content management system (CMS) Storyblok was recently utilised by Spendesk, a fintech platform, to scale its website and consolidate all of its content into one CMS. 

Previously, Spendesk used two CMSs to manage its content, but the developers experienced technical limitations and the content team could not edit or build pages quickly without breaking the website. 

Upon experiencing this, they decided to migrate to a single CMS that met the needs of the marketing, development, and design teams and optimise both internal collaboration and the overall experience for clients.

After making the move to Storyblok, Spendesk reduced page creation time by 80%, experienced up to two times faster CMS speeds, and achieved a 25% smaller codebase by using dynamic pages.

Lionel Paulus, senior front-end engineer at Spendesk, said, “Pages that used to take hours to build now only take minutes with Storyblok. The Visual Editor gives our content team complete autonomy by delivering a live preview of the pages they’re working on. While our previous CMSs were expensive and didn’t provide the benefits we needed, Storyblok’s CMS capabilities deliver great value.”

Meanwhile, Dominik Angerer, co-founder and CEO of Storyblok, commented, “Spendesk’s experience proves that modern content requires future-proof ways to manage content with a CMS that is optimised for performance and works for every team.”

Singapore – Singaporean parents are increasingly concerned about their child’s safety on the internet, according to Google’s ‘APAC Kids and Families Online Safety Survey’, which mainly reveals that seeing inappropriate content online is the most experienced online safety issue by Singaporean children, with one in two children having encountered it at least once in the past year.

These findings come at a time where children in Singapore are spending more time online than ever before, with four out of five local children now spending one to six hours online daily for education and entertainment.

Notably, data from the survey suggests that the top three types of inappropriate content reported by parents were misinformation at 55.4%, deceptive ads and spam at 50.7%, and violent content at 48.7%.

However the survey also revealed that Singaporean parents are becoming less confident in discussing online safety with their children. This year’s survey found that only 79% of respondents feel confident in engaging their children on this topic, down from 83% last year.

Factors for this decline in confidence may include difficulty of finding age-appropriate and easy-to-understand examples of online safety issues and the rapidly evolving nature of the online world. In addition, nearly half of the parents surveyed said they struggle to find the right time to talk to their children about online safety.

Despite these gaps, more than half of respondents said they are willing to allow their children to spend more time online and expect to change digital rules for their child’s Internet use as they grow older. This also draws concern as parents are faced with the need to develop new rules – sometimes before even putting the fundamentals in place – which makes the online journeys of children increasingly challenging to manage.

Speaking on the results, Norman Ng, regional operations lead, trust & safety global engagement at Google Singapore, said, “Our survey results highlight the urgent need to make online safety a central part of their conversations at home. We understand that each family’s relationship with technology is unique, and we encourage parents to make good use of tools such as Family Link and Be Internet Awesome to aid their digital parenting.”

“As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. We remain committed in stepping up our efforts in working collaboratively with industry partners and experts to ensure digital literacy remains more accessible for all,” he added. 

Lastly, the survey also indicated several suggestions and tools that parents can use to a create safer experience online such as age-appropriate content restrictions via Family Link, blurring graphic content through SafeSearch, child-friendly app settings or versions such as Youtube Kids, and online education and safety resources like The library of Digital Safety Resources and the Be Internet Awesome program.

Singapore – Global professional and consulting services company Accenture has announced its strategic investment in generative AI platform Writer under ‘Project Spotlight’, their engagement and investment program that aims to help enterprises create and shape content more efficiently.

This investment allows Accenture to further provide marketing and communications professionals with Writer’s features to generate written content, synthesise various content and align writing to voice and brand guidelines.

Accenture started using Writer in 2021 to augment its writing proficiency and is now scaling Writer’s generative AI capabilities internally, while also preparing to offer them to clients as part of its existing capabilities.

This investment is also a part of Accenture’s announcement in June 2023 that the company would invest $3 billion in its Data & AI practice to help clients across all industries rapidly and responsibly advance and use AI to achieve greater growth, efficiency, and resilience.

Baiju Shah, chief strategy officer at Accenture Song, said, “Our continued investments in generative AI platforms will empower clients across all industries to transform how they create, personalise and distribute content at pace, but also safely, securely and with brand integrity.”

“We’ve entered a new era of tech-powered creativity and believe Writer’s enterprise-ready platform is a strong addition to Accenture’s comprehensive set of generative AI capabilities, tools and expertise, helping our clients capitalise on a wide range of uses across marketing and sales,” he added.

Meanwhile, May Habib, CEO and co-founder of Writer, commented, “Joining Accenture’s ‘Project Spotlight’ program will enable Writer to benefit from Accenture’s expertise from decades of deploying AI across industries and functions, and help us grow by driving broader awareness of our capabilities.” 

Notably, Writer is the latest company to join Accenture’s Project Spotlight, which offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients, helping startups harness human creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology.

Singapore – New data shows that Filipino consumers who visit pirate streaming sites are prone to 21.66 times greater risk of malware infections, with a verifiable detection rate of 10%. This was according to the latest study conducted by the Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA) alongside Dr. Paul Watters of Cyberstronomy.

The report’s findings reveal that when Filipino consumers access pirate torrent sites, the risk of malware infection increases 16.66 times when compared to mainstream platforms. The confirmed infection rate is 18%.

It concluded that a typical user visiting a pirate site faces the threat of infection by ransomware, numerous trojan horses, and other advanced persistent threats (APTs). These infections could occur within 42 seconds on a Windows machine and just 1 minute and 18 seconds on an Android device.

Matt Cheetham, general manager of CAP, said, “Evidence continues to mount that far from being a victimless crime, piracy can victimize consumers.” 

He added, “We look forward to the successful passage of site blocking legislation in the Senate that will allow the Philippines to both protect its consumers from online harm posed by pirate sites and grow its economy.” 

Singapore – In collaboration with global customer relationship management (CRM) software company Salesforce, global cloud communications firm Vonage has launched Vonage ‘Conversations for Salesforce’, a configurable omnichannel messaging app powered by the Vonage Communications Platform. 

Vonage’s new app provides a flexible and scalable way of sending SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp messages from within Salesforce, making it easy for businesses to develop custom workflows using standard Salesforce tools.

This feature aims to enable businesses to serve customers directly from the Salesforce platform and deliver exceptional customer engagements, whilst blending bot and Vonage Contact Center (VCC) agent interactions.

With Salesforce as a single source of truth for customer data, users can participate in a conversation and access the entire customer history. Response-handling can also be automated with chatbots or routed automatically to the right agent or organisation to enable fast resolution.

Savinay Berry, EVP, product & engineering at Vonage, said, “Vonage ‘Conversations for Salesforce’ unlocks the power of delivering personalised two-way interactions with customers from Salesforce, enabling engagement at scale with SMS, MMS and WhatsApp channels while blending bot and VCC agent interactions.”

“Based on Salesforce’s best practices and latest tools, the app overcomes the constraints of existing solutions and is enabling conversations across the entire organisation,” he added. 

Vonage Conversations for Salesforce is part of the full Vonage AI Acceleration Suite for Salesforce, a portfolio of AI-capable, low-code/no-code programmable components that aim to help speed business transformation and seamlessly integrate with Salesforce applications to enable personalised conversations across omni-channel communications.

Sydney, Australia – Sitecore, a comprehensive digital experience software platform, has acknowledged its ongoing commitment to incorporating AI capabilities into its range of content and commerce solutions. This statement was announced in Sydney during the Sitecore DX (digital experience) Sydney 2023 conference. The business has already incorporated AI capabilities into its personalization and content cloud software.

A personalisation platform from Sitecore enables brands to gain insights from customers’ prior website interactions and has introduced an AI-driven Content Cloud for businesses.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has already been fully integrated into the company’s suite of fully modular software solutions. By enabling marketers to integrate Generative AI capabilities into their Sitecore-driven marketing technology stack, this new feature, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, improves efficiency, personalization, and scalable content production across Sitecore’s broad range of modular solutions.

Marketers can adapt their solutions by integrating their AI tools through open APIs (application programming interfaces) and customizable user interfaces (UIs) using Sitecore’s fully-modular approach. Examples from the real world include integrating ChatGPT into the Sitecore XM Cloud CMS (content management system) for quick translations and using ChatGPT to edit marketing content in the content hub to better tailor it to target audiences and distribution channels.

Additionally, Sitecore customers can use Dall-E to create various image variations for omnichannel campaigns managed by Sitecore’s Content Cloud.

Steve Tzikakis, CEO of Sitecore, said, “The future of marketing technology and brand experience will be AI-fuelled due to the sheer power of machine learning tools. However, businesses will need to move away from legacy software stacks, and infuse AI systems into composable software approaches that enable true flexibility and the ability to provide their customers with personalised and rich experiences.”

In a recent survey of 400 marketers in the US, Sitecore identified generative AI as a beneficial innovation that brand marketers must implement if they want to offer quick personalization to customers looking for immersive and intuitive digital experiences.

Tzikakis also commented, “Our Generative AI offering has been created to integrate with our composable strategy. Generative AI developments are moving incredibly fast. In fact, while 77% of US marketers feel their technology can handle AI demands, 45% are concerned by the significant costs they perceive will be required to maintain growth.” 

He added, “Sitecore’s composable platform helps combat this fear by giving Sitecore customers the ability to leverage our unique, composable offering, which allows brands to control when and how much spend they can invest depending on customer needs.”

Singapore – Sprinklr, a platform that manages customer experiences in modern companies, has recently made public the integration of its Sprinklr AI+ platform with Vertex AI on Google Cloud, enhancing its capabilities for unified customer experience management.

The Sprinklr AI+ platform provides generative AI capabilities for use across various business functions with strict governance and security standards. This integration enables users of Sprinklr to improve productivity and user experiences by fusing Vertex AI models with Sprinklr’s own AI.

With over 1,250 industry-specific AI models covering more than 100 languages and 150 countries, Sprinklr AI+ is the next phase in the development of Sprinklr’s AI. In order to provide customers with structured insights, it processes volumes of unstructured data, including text, audio, video, images, metrics, and time series data. 

Additionally, users of Sprinklr now have access to features across all four Sprinklr product suites: Sprinklr Service, Sprinklr Social, Sprinklr Marketing, and Sprinklr Insights, thanks to the integration of GoogleCloud’s Vertex AI APIs.

By implementing generative AI, retail companies can optimise their contact centre operations. This will allow service agents to modify response attributes like length, tone, and grammar with a single click. Additionally, this development gives agents access to personalised, real-time excerpts from chosen articles, streamlining customer interactions and developing service quality.

Speaking about the partnership, Ragy Thomas, CEO and founder of Sprinklr, remarked, “Generative AI is giving our AI wings. Our customers demand the ability to work with their preferred AI tools and partners and offering flexibility and choice is a major advantage. This expanded partnership with Google Cloud allows us to offer our customers access to their preferred generative AI platforms integrated with Sprinklr’s proprietary AI+ focused specifically on deriving insights from unstructured customer experience (CX) data.”

He added, “Together we can help the world’s most iconic brands leverage AI to break down silos and empower marketing, sales, and customer service professionals to serve customers the way they should in the new world.”

Meanwhile, Rodrigo Rocha, director of global partnerships at Google Cloud, said, “Generative AI can create entirely new experiences for users and value for businesses.Through our partnership, Vertex AI will power new generative AI experiences for Sprinklr users while ensuring the highest levels of data privacy and security.” 

Singapore – Snapchat has announced the launch of its ‘strike system’, with the goal of giving its 13 to 17-year-old users a safety measure when browsing their platform. With the addition of this new strike system, Snapchat aims to become a secure and safe messaging platform for minors. 

The company is releasing a number of new features today with the clear goal of enhancing the protection of 13–17-year-olds from potential online risks. These upcoming features have been designed to accomplish three main objectives, to protect teenagers from unwanted contact from people they don’t know in real life, adapt the content viewing experience to the users’ age range, and improve the effectiveness of identifying and removing accounts promoting age-inappropriate content. 

A strike system and detection technologies will be used to achieve this. The company’s goal for the safety and wellbeing of its young user demographic can be seen in the fact that these features are set to go live in the upcoming weeks.

They have implemented this new strike system in an effort to combat accounts that promote content that is inappropriate for children. Any content that is flagged as inappropriate, whether it is discovered proactively or is reported, is immediately removed under this system. In addition, they may decide to ban an account if it repeatedly tries to violate their policies.

“Our commitment to making our platform safer is always on, and we will continue to build on these improvements in the coming months with additional protections for teen Snapchatters and support for parents,” Snap said in a press statement.

Philippines – Outbrain, an open-source technology platform, has recently announced a new partnership with Summit Media, a local digital lifestyle media network. Outbrain’s continued leadership in providing product offerings, platform capabilities, and service is shown by this three-year contract.

The partnership creates more opportunities for advertisers to connect with targeted consumer audiences by extending Outbrain’s AI-driven customisation across Summit Media’s premium digital properties, which include platforms like PEP.ph, Cosmo.PH, Smart Parenting PH, and Esquire PH.

A diverse and engaged audience can be reached by advertisers by exclusively featuring Summit Media on the Outbrain network. An individualised user experience is promoted by Outbrain’s platform, which not only improves brand visibility but also incorporates content recommendations from advertisers.

Speaking about the partnership, Eve Solomon, managing director of publisher business development for JAPAC at Outbrain, commented, “Summit Media’s choice to once again partner with Outbrain after a brief stint with another advertising platform brings us great joy and is a clear indication of Outbrain’s unmatched ability to deliver outstanding results for our publishers and advertisers.” 

She added, “With Summit Media’s extensive network of websites, advertisers gain access to a broad and engaged audience, elevating the reach and impact of their campaigns. We look forward to empowering more advertisers to leverage the potential of native advertising and reach their target audiences effectively.”

Meanwhile, Monette De Leon, head of programmatic sales at Summit Media, said, “Outbrain’s platform empowers us to deliver relevant and engaging content to our readers seamlessly. We are confident that this new partnership will further elevate the user experience on our sites and enable us to attract more advertisers to run campaigns with us through Outbrain.”