Tag: Technology

California, USA – Global user retention platform CleverTap has appointed Honey Bajaj as its newest senior vice president and global chief of consumer experience. Through her new roles, Bajaj will pioneer CleverTap’s extensive program to help companies reimagine customer experience.

Prior to joining CleverTap, Bajaj has built an innovation pipeline for several Fortune 500 companies, including Boston Consulting Group Digital Ventures, Disney, Microsoft Research, MIT Media Lab and Tata Group. She has also have extensive experience as an innovation leader and a social entrepreneur in India and the United States.

Speaking about her appointment, Bajaj said, “I have always focused on designing for impact and inventing for scale by contextualising tech for the consumers. The truth is, no matter what we think we’re doing, we are all in the customer-experience business. Before you can accomplish it, you need to envision it. The digital behaviour and expectations of customers is evolving faster than most industries are able to deliver. I am looking forward to my journey with CleverTap to embed human-centred principles and design thinking into a series of initiatives and programs.”

She added, “These efforts will allow digital-first companies to co-create and simulate digital journeys that will fuel growth through superior customer experience and will enable CleverTap’s customers to realise their consumer journeys in a more seamless and contextual manner as the lines of the digital and omnichannel world are no longer separated.”

Meanwhile, Vikrant Chowdhary, chief growth officer at CleverTap, commented, “As we scale CleverTap into a global category creator for ‘Retention Cloud’, we realise that our customers are eager to co-create experiences that will fuel growth and the future of their own digital businesses. For this reason, we are expanding our leadership team with a new appointment that benefits the most important stakeholder: our customers’ customers.”

He added, “From fintech to ecommerce, and from on-demand super apps to media and streaming services, companies need the inspiration and tangible examples of the ‘Art of Possible’ to unleash human-centred design thinking, unlock new perspectives and drive powerful momentum and positive results for all stakeholders.”

Most recently, CleverTap has welcomed Anand Venkatraman as its newest chief operating officer.

Australia – Australian ad tech company Cartelux has appointed former Audi Global head of media manager Kristin Harder as global head of strategy and partnerships.

The new role will see Harder steer the strategic direction of the company, launch marketing initiatives, and grow the business’ global partnership networks.

Harder joins from Audi, where during her nine-year tenure, she managed marketing communication, events & sponsorship for China, Audi’s single most important market. Her career grew to incorporate global marketing responsibilities when she became global head of sales media, before taking on global media responsibilities. 

Kristin Harder, head of strategy and partnerships at Cartelux said, “Cartelux is targeting a long-standing pain point within global campaign management by integrating retail networks seamlessly into the campaign and media buying process.” 

Harder welcomed the opportunity to apply her international experience to the fast-paced startup world as Cartelux shapes the future of retail marketing. “I have seen first-hand the critical divide that often lies between OEM and retail networks, in particular in digital advertising. Maximising synergies is critical for reaching in-market audiences at the right time and place. Cartelux has truly innovated this space by offering a simple, time and cost-efficient platform solution,” Harder added.

Cartelux Founder and CEO Josh Williams commented, “Kristin’s global experience, understanding of the most complex automotive retail environment, combined with her global marketing and media background is a perfect fit for the company. I am delighted to have her on board to grow the business together.” 

Harder joins the senior management team of automotive veterans at Cartelux, including Global Industry Lead Automotive Raoul Picello, General Manager EMEA Herve Genin, Global General Manager Patrick Doble, and Chief Financial Officer Stephen Burns. 

The appointment comes at a time of rapid global growth for the business following client activations in Thailand, India, Australia, Switzerland, Spain, and Germany.

Adelaide, Australia – RiskRecon, a security assessment provider under Mastercard, has entered into an Australian-first partnership with Openly, a privacy-tech startup based out of the Stone & Chalk innovation hub in Adelaide’s Lot Fourteen, to provide organisations with a complete view of their supply chain privacy and cyber risk posture.

As a part of Mastercard’s Global Cybersecurity Alliance Program, Openly has integrated RiskRecon cyber risk data into its platform. Openly Vendor Monitor customers can now view RiskRecon cyber risk ratings for every vendor in the platform based on continuously updated data.

Openly Co-Founder Jay Gilden said “As we see progress toward significant privacy law reform in Australia, senior business leaders are placing more weight upon the importance of privacy for long term business health… this is driving up the appetite for investment in innovation.” He also mentioned that the announcement, which comes at the start of Privacy Awareness Week, highlights that Australia can lead the way in global privacy innovation.

Gilden said the catalyst for partnering with Mastercard was the uptake of its new product, Openly Vendor Monitor, across global markets.

“When we launched Openly Vendor Monitor in mid-April, we saw more than 200 businesses join in 72 hours. We planned to launch softly into the Australian market, and suddenly we had customers in 37 countries.”

Openly’s ‘Vendor Monitor’ bolsters transparency between buyers and suppliers through continuous privacy risk monitoring. The platform watches and updates more than 19,000 vendor profiles daily, and can detect changes to key business information, privacy documentation, terms of service agreements and public records.

Kelly White, founder at MasterCard RiskRecon said that the addition of RiskRecon’s cyber risk ratings into Openly Vendor Monitor provides an added layer of critical information for buyers when assessing and managing supply chain risk.

“By combining Openly’s innovative approach to continuous privacy risk monitoring with RiskRecon’s cyber risk ratings, organisations now have access to enhanced visibility of their risk profile across their supplier relationships. We are excited about partnering with Openly to simplify an increasingly complex supply chain risk landscape,” White said.

Shenzhen, China — WeBank, a Chinese digital bank, has launched its new brand ‘WeBank Blockchain’ with an ethos of ‘New Opportunity, New Mission, New Journey’ at a launch conference.

At the launch event, WeBank proposed a new mission of building trusted Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) infrastructure to promote equity and sustainable development for its blockchain technology. Through this, WeBank will construct a trusted foundation for stakeholders engaged in strategies involving government, the business community and the general public.

NanqingLi, president of WeBank, said, “In the past seven years, WeBank Blockchain has accomplished two interim missions and met its goals to realize a technology that is secure, controllable and open-sourced achieving industrial digitalization.”

Li added, “Today, fintech is transforming from merely improving efficiency to promoting equity and sustainable development. WeBank will leverage its advantages in strategic positioning, agile trial-and-error experimentation, dedication to innovation and exploring cutting-edge technologies to promote equity and sustainability with WeBank Blockchain.”

WeBank started to navigate blockchain in 2015. One year later, it co-launched Financial Services Blockchain Consortium (FISCO BCCOS), the first blockchain consortium in China’s finance industry. Since then, driving the blockchain and fintech sector forward has been a core mission for the digital bank.

In 2017, WeBank realized its own secure and controllable blockchain technology and led the open-source development of FISCO BCOS, the financial-grade open-source consortium chain platform. After releasing the source code, WeBank has been actively promoting the application of blockchain for industrial digitalization, further boosting the development of the real economy in China.

Today, the open-source consortium chain ecosystem initiated by WeBank Blockchain along with other parties has attracted thousands of institutions and individual members. It has successfully supported the deployment of several hundred blockchain applications in various industries such as finance, legal and justice, healthcare, and more with more than 200 benchmarking applications for industrial digitalization.

Commenting on the launch of WeBank Blockchain, Henry Ma, executive VP and chief information officer of WeBank, said, “After nearly seven years of rapid development, WeBank Blockchain has completed building the foundation in terms of notion, technology and ecosystem and is ready to embark on a new journey.”

Meanwhile, Hata Fan, deputy general manager of technology development for the distributed business of WeBank and head of WeBank Blockchain, said that WeBank Blockchain plans to accomplish its new mission by driving ESG applications and talent cultivation based on the solid foundation of an open-sourced technology and ecosystem which are summarized as “2 foundations + 2 drives”.

To better promote ESG development, WeBank Blockchain will focus on key technologies used for privacy computing, trusted governance, distributed digital identity and more. It will develop the framework for ESG applications and build an open-source ecosystem promoting quick and efficient implementation of ESG programs. Through an open-source ecosystem, WeBank Blockchain will work with more partners to drive ESG applications and cultivate talent with both blockchain and ESG capabilities, which is expected to cover more than 100,000 training opportunities.

Hanoi, Vietnam – MetaBomb, a play-to-earn game, is launching its IDO in April and dropping a few bombs on the GameFi market in Q2 of 2022. 

According to Binance Academy, IDO is a crypto token offering run on a Decentralized Exchange (DEX). Liquidity pools (LP) play an essential role in IDO’s by creating liquidity post-sale. A typical IDO lets users lock funds in exchange for new tokens during the token generation event. 

MetaBomb is coming closer to the final production stage and with the ideas of GameFi 2.0 in mind, this play to earn game will be the place where players can be immersed in the true potential of a metaverse.

Stepping into the GameFi market in its infancy, MetaBomb Founder Cuong Vu has experienced all its ups and downs. “It is the blooming time of GameFi and blockchain when several big names enter this space.” said Cuong Vu, CEO of MetaBomb.

MTB token is the main in-game currency. It will be used to buy Hero Box, fusion and upgrade Hero level, mainly in the first phase. The player’s income level will change naturally which requires the player to continuously reinvest in the game if they want to keep the income steady.

“The way it operates will unfold soon and promises to amaze many players,” said Vu.

He supplemented that the in-game activities and upgrading systems are tools to ensure steady funding to a balanced and healthy game economy, assuring the sustainable development of the project.

According to MetaBomb, they are currently developing and soon to launch an NFT system that has the ability to store values of assets and resist inflation just like ‘gold’ in the real world. 

The game is designed with a variety of game modes, many types of fee arising from game activities and upgrading items that will help keep the player’s pool reward stable and healthy.

Southeast Asia and South America are the go-to-markets for MetaBomb to acquire established play-to-earn game lovers. MetaBomb would later expand its marketing activities to North America, Europe, and East Asia.

The game’s Testnet version will be released on the BNB chain in April 2022.

Hanoi, Vietnam – Small businesses in Vietnam are most likely to invest in technology in contrast to their SMB counterparts in APAC during 2021, new data from CPA Australia shows.

This focus in investing in technology was evident by the fact that seven in ten of the Vietnamese SMB respondents expect to grow this year, the third highest result in the Asia-Pacific. Strong investment in technology and government support are likely to be key drivers of this turnaround.

In addition, Vietnam’s small businesses are the most likely to increase their emphasis on online sales and up their investment in technology in reaction to COVID-19. This change saw the percentage that earned more than 10% of their revenue online jump from 60% in 2020 to 73% in 2021.

Of the markets surveyed, Vietnam was most adversely impacted by the pandemic, with 78% of small businesses nominating it as their biggest barrier to growth last year. In response, many local small businesses invested in improving their business, with 44% increasing their investment in technology and 42% shifting to online sales. Both results were the highest of the markets surveyed.

Can Van Luc, chair of North Vietnam Advisory Committee at CPA Australia said, “While 2021 was a difficult year, 45% of Vietnamese small businesses still managed to grow. Under the government’s dual goals of ‘preventing the pandemic and promoting socio-economic recovery’, inflow of foreign direct investment has grown steadily over the past year–up by 9.2% in 2021. Recovering domestic and overseas demand, together with government policy support, have bolstered small businesses operations and accelerated their digital transformation.”

The data also noted that 60% of Vietnam’s small businesses stated they reviewed their cybersecurity protections in the past six months, nearly double the 32% recorded in 2020. Further, 42% sought professional advice from IT consultants or specialists in the past 12 months.

“Threats of cyberattacks are on the rise as small businesses digitalise. [Around] 64% of respondents are concerned that their business could be cyberattacked in 2022. Given that our country has increased the pace of the development of its digital economy, small businesses should keep investing in capabilities to safeguard themselves against increasing malicious cyberattacks. Measures such as enhancing cybersecurity and consulting IT consultants are crucial to protecting vital assets and customer data,” Luc added.

Singapore – Machine learning company Moloco has announced the latest updates to its cloud-based programmatic advertising platform, ‘Moloco Cloud Demand-Side Platform’ (DSP). 

The Moloco Cloud DSP latest updates will focus on improving performance through intelligent budget allocation, automating workflows through smart campaign user interface, user experience (UI/UX), and ad creation. 

Powered by Moloco’s proprietary machine learning algorithms, the updates include ‘optimised budget allocation’, where real-time data is continuously incorporated into the machine learning engine, while the ‘intuitive campaign setup interface’, with Moloco’s new UI/UX updates, enables marketers to set up their campaigns through an intuitive guided flow and experience built-in recommendations. With this, customers can now create new campaigns in four easy steps with built-in recommendations presented based on the campaign’s goals. And lastly, the ‘auto-generated video end cards’, which allows the platform to now auto-generate video end cards in portrait, landscape and square formats when uploading a video as the campaign’s creative.

Anurag Agrawal, VP of product at Moloco, said, “Our DSP solution empowers growth marketers to leverage their own unique, first-party data to increase the returns on their advertising campaigns.”

He added, “These latest updates, combined with our powerful machine learning algorithms that pinpoint target audiences and adjust bidding strategies in real time, help our customers not only improve their overall campaign experience, but also help achieve greater accuracy and higher performance at lower cost.”

Sydney, Australia — Alida, a Total Experience Management (TXM) software company, has announced the upcoming launch of its new data centre in Sydney in winter this year. 

The new Sydney data centre, which will cater Australian and New Zealand customers, enables an increase in data performance and speed in these regions. It also promises to aid global organisations operating or looking to expand within the Oceanic region. Having locally available data will enhance the data collection process and efficiently meet clients’ regional compliance requirements. 

Riaz Raihan, president of products and engineering at Alida, believes that customer centricity lives at the heart of Alida’s business priorities and is the driving force behind this exciting new data centre.

“We made the decision to launch this service expansion after carefully listening to our customers and taking action on their desired data needs. We look forward to offering our customers in Australia and New Zealand a local CX solution that yields high performing and reliable data collection services,” said Raihan. 

Meanwhile, Steven Medeiros, SVP and general manager at Alida APAC, shared that Alida’s expansion in Australia will enable their clients to build better engaged and online communities for ongoing customer feedback.

“Working together with our local partners, we are in a great position to help organisations across Asia Pacific to improve their customer experience, accelerate innovation, increase revenue, and mitigate decision risk,” said Medeiros. 

Sydney, Australia – Google is giving recognition to IT professionals who  have  kept “the world working” through a new global campaign, created together with  customer experience agency, Apparent.

Google Chrome Enterprise in particular, has given recognition to IT professionals to put the spotlight on IT professionals’ stories by showcasing how they kept the world connected, learning and working  through their initiatives in allowing organisations to work remotely, connecting families with loved ones and giving students access to virtual classrooms, and so much more when the pandemic swept the globe. 

The ‘Leaptakers’ video campaign features testimonies of those who were affected by the pandemic and how humankind have taken great leaps throughout history. Now, the IT pros, whose endeavours and innovation often remain invisible, are being recognised for the rightful credit they deserve.

‘Leaptakers’ global campaign by Apparent

New York-based director Christian Padron and production company Scheme Engine were engaged to capture these inspirational stories, which were then turned into films and written articles.Michelle Turchini, executive creative director at Apparent , commented, “As the pandemic hit and the world scrambled to different ways of working, learning and connecting with loved ones, it was IT professionals who overcame some of the most difficult challenges to enable ongoing communication seamlessly and at scale. 

“The Leaptakers stories are just a small celebration of the challenges they faced, the solutions they built and the impact they’ve had on the lives of people across the globe, recognising the vital and ongoing contribution they made and continue to make every day,” Turchini added.  

Apparent, which has worked with Google since 2012, embarked on a global search, engaging the IT community, harnessing partners and internal audiences and enlisted advocates through social media to get their personal stories of how they kept the world working during the pandemic. 

Five were chosen among thousands of potential unique stories, including Life Lines in the United Kingdom, a project to provide virtual visits between critically ill patients and their loved ones during the pandemic, facilitating more than a million minutes of calls from 180 UK hospitals to loved ones around the world. Meanwhile, in the US, Achievement First helped children thrive when schools closed their doors, delivering 2,800 education professionals and 15,000 children across three states with access to technology.  Product Marketing Lead from Google Chrome Enterprise, Steve Ervin,  added, “During a time of incredible disruption, the IT Leaptakers stepped up to ensure the world was connected and kept working. Often going unnoticed, this campaign recognises the importance and significance of these professionals and their notable achievements.”

Apparent further extended the campaign, through social media amplification, with a way to find and celebrate the Leaptakers by sending a customised thank you to IT teams, so not only would they feel more visible, but more appreciated, too.

Cebu, Philippines — Holy Week has already started for Catholics in the Philippines which means that members are now prepping for the tradition of ‘Visita Iglesia’, which is the visitation of seven different churches that falls on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. This year, telco Smart’s digital tourism program ‘Panaw sa Pagtuo’ (Journey of Faith) is making the tradition more fruitful for those that are keen to visit churches in Cebu by employing QR code ‘markers’ that would share tourism and historical facts specifically on seven heritage churches in the city of Cebu.

The first four churches are St. Catherine of Alexandria Parish in Carcar, Sibonga’s Nuestra Señora del Pilar Parish, St. Gabriel the Archangel Parish Church in Santander, and the St. Michael the Archangel Church in Argao.

The next three churches included in Smart’s digital tourism program are considered national historical sites by the National Historical Institute (NHI). These are San Guillermo de Aquitana Parish Church in Dalaguete, considered a National Historical Landmark by the NHI; Nuestra Senora del Patrocinio de Maria Parish Church in Boljoon, considered a national historical treasure due to its resilient heritage by the NHI and the National Museum; and St. Michael the Archangel Church in Samboan, one of Cebu’s oldest church which was built in 1842 and nationally protected heritage structure by the NHI.

Smart’s Panaw sa Pagtuo mobile app is also available for free for pilgrims opting for virtual Visita Iglesia.