News
Adobe announced this week it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Frame.io, a cloud-based video collaboration platform. The acquisition price tag is $1.275 billion.
With Frame.io, video editors collaborate using cloud-first workflows. The acquisition will integrate Frame.io’s review and approval functionality into Adobe’s creative software offerings, including Premiere Pro and After Effects video editing products.
This is the second acquisition by Adobe in the last year that supports the collaborative nature of creative work. Adobe acquired Workfront last December for $1.5 billion, bringing the collaboration tool into its marketing software suite. "Collaboration is the next wave of creativity: Digital collaboration is now the foundation of all creative endeavors," Adobe officials wrote in the press release announcing the Frame.io deal.
Adobe’s acquisition of Frame.io brings Adobe Creative Cloud’s collaboration services to video. Adobe recently introduced enhancements to Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries, Cloud Documents, Design Systems in Adobe XD, Adobe Stock and Adobe Fonts. Frame.io's inclusion into the creative suite will allow teams to collaborate across Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and other Adobe Creative Cloud applications.
Frame.io co-founder and CEO Emery Wells and co-founder John Traver will join Adobe. The deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter of Adobe’s 2021 fiscal year.
In other customer experience and digital marketing software news ...
Talkdesk Valued at $10B After $230M Funding Round
Customer experience software provider Talkdesk announced the closing of its Series D $230 million funding that now values the company at more than $10 billion. The company also announced the appointment of Sydney Carey as chief financial officer.
The funding came from new investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group. Existing investors Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors and Willoughby Capital also participated. In total, Talkdesk has now raised $498 million in funding since its 2011 founding.
Carey joins Talkdesk from Sumo Logic, where she led the organization through an initial public offering. She also held CFO positions at Duo Security (acquired by Cisco), Apttus, Zscaler and MongoDB. She additionally served as executive vice president and CFO at TIBCO Software, a multibillion-dollar public software company. Carey currently serves on the board of directors for Asana, a work management platform for teams.
Open-Source CMS Vendor Umbraco Acquired by Investor Monterro
Content management system supplier Umbraco has been acquired by Swedish software growth investor Monterro. Monterro now owns a majority stake in the Danish open-source CMS vendor. Umbraco CEO Kim Sneum Madsen will continue in his leadership role, while founder Niels Hartvig will leave the company to pursue other opportunities.
Founded in 2005, Umbraco offerings include the flagship, open-source Umbraco CMS; Umbraco Heartcore, a headless CMS; Umbraco Cloud; and Umbraco Uno, a platform for non-technical marketers and creative agencies. Monterro has completed 17 investments and 17 add-on investments since 2012. These include operational experience from companies such as Pointsec, Orc Software, and CMS vendor Episerver, now Optimizely.
MOLOCO Closes $150 Million Series C Financing
MOLOCO, a machine learning and growth solutions provider for mobile app marketers and ecommerce companies, announced a successful $150 million Series C funding round. Tiger Global Management, an investment firm focused on public and private companies in the global internet, software, consumer and financial technology industries, led the round with participation from existing investors. MOLOCO has now raised a total of $200 million to date. Its latest funding gives the company a $1.5 billion valuation.
MOLOCO was founded in 2013 by Ikkjin Ahn, an early machine learning engineer at YouTube. While at YouTube and Android, Ahn built significant parts of the company's data and machine learning infrastructure. He founded MOLOCO with the vision of making sophisticated machine learning algorithms available as a cloud service.
MOLOCO Cloud is a Demand Side Platform (DSP) for advertisers to programmatically purchase ad inventory across the mobile app ecosystem. It leverages the company's machine learning engine, first-party data and contextual signals to optimize ad spend.
Amplience Launches Google Core Web Vitals
Commerce experience platform Amplience launched a new algorithm, Core Web Vitals. Dynamic Media, Amplience's headless image and video content management solution, creates experiences across ecommerce sites from the landing page through to product details. Its automated optimization of visual content is designed to help retailers deliver a digital experience that meets the new Core Web Vitals and achieve high Google SEO scores.
Google has placed increased focus on the digital experience with the introduction of its three new parameters: the time it takes for a website to load the largest image and text in view; the reactivity of a website; and the consistency in which content is displayed.
Amplience's Dynamic Media solution uses microservices-based, API-first, cloud native and headless (MACH) technologies to speed up and automate processes, unify image and videos with all other content and deliver images in the format, dimension and pixel density.
Amplience has also introduced Smart Images, which automatically serves up the smallest and most compatible image format based on the browser; Extensions, which includes an image transformation or product selector extension, while also allowing brands to build their own; and Image Recognition, a tool to find, filter and organize images based on particular attributes.
ActionIQ Partners with Merkle
Customer experience management (CXM) firm Merkle has announced an expansion of its premiere partnership with ActionIQ, provider of a customer data platform (CDP). Merkle has completed a full integration of its Merkury identity platform within ActionIQ, which aims to resolve consumer identity and enhance digital customer profiles to help marketers maximize personalization outcomes.
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Merkle’s Merkury resolves anonymous and known consumer identity, cleanses and dedupes data and brings offline-based data attributes of U.S. consumers to the integrated solution. It enriches digital customer profiles with offline data; links fragmented consumer data to a universal ID by combining attributes and identifiers; and applies cookie-less addressability into paid media channels and premium publisher platforms.
According to company officials, increased accuracy and richness of person-based identifiers expands upon ActionIQ PersonMatchTM, the CDP's existing machine-learning powered identity product.
NICE Launches Enlighten XO
NICE has announced the launch of Enlighten XO, which generates insights from human conversations in real-time to build self-service with advanced AI. Enlighten XO streamlines the development of digital self-service applications by bringing in data from past interactions to optimize future self-service experiences. With Enlighten XO, organizations can take a data-driven, self-learning, empirical approach to increase self-service effectiveness.
It analyzes interactions from platforms to discover the best opportunities for automation, while also identifying customer intents, training phrases and problem-solving activities.
mParticle Introduces Data Privacy and Control Features
CDP provider mParticle announced a series of new features aimed at helping companies maintain compliance with data privacy rules and regulations, including the latest Apple iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency (ATT) requirements.
Privacy restrictions in Apple's recent iOS 14.5 release, which includes the ATT framework, are designed to address consumer privacy concerns and help users understand and control how their data is being tracked and used. The new mParticle features help its CDP customers to enforce granular privacy controls in compliance with iOS 14.5 privacy guidelines.
The new features extend mParticle’s existing data governance capabilities which already support the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The privacy features were developed to support the increased granularity of choices consumers want to see.
Features include:
- IDFA Data Minimization: mParticle allows data sent into and out of its platform to be controlled by the customer. Starting in version 8.0 of mParticle’s Apple SDK, mParticle’s platform no longer collects Apple’s Identity for Advertisers (IDFA) by default. App developers can still manually choose to provide the IDFA.
- Record ATT Consent Status: mParticle acts as a system of record for ATT consent decisions associated with each Apple device (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV).
Mark Picone Joins Acquia from Adobe
Digital experience platform provider Acquia welcomed Mark Picone to its leadership team as general manager and senior vice president of product for marketing cloud. Picone previously served as vice president of information and data services at Adobe, where he spearheaded data strategy, platforms, data management, governance and analytics across all lines of business and corporate functions.
Prior to Adobe, Picone was responsible for global data development for all data and analytics products across 27 countries at Experian Marketing Services. Before Experian, he served in group managing director, general manager and CTO roles for Harte-Hanks Direct Marketing.
Kibo Announces Allison Dancy as CMO
Kibo, a commerce provider, announced Allison Dancy has joined the company as its CMO. Prior to joining Kibo, Dancy was the CMO at OneTouchPoint, and before that, she was the marketing leader for Gotransverse, a subscription and billing software provider. She began her career in marketing with IBM and Vignette before moving into marketing leadership roles with OpenText and CDS Global.
inMotionNow Also Adds New CMO
In other leadership announcements marketing resource management solution provider introduced Russ Somers as the new company CMO. Somers joins inMotionNow from TrustRadius, a startup that facilitates peer-driven business technology reviews. Before TrustRadius, Somers led marketing for TrendKite, a public relations measurement tool that was acquired by Cision in 2019 for $225 million.
The April 2021 merger between inMotionNow and Lytho has led to new permanent executive roles and promotions, including:
- Niels Bouwman, who co-founded Lytho and served as the company’s CEO, was named as president of inMotionNow and will be responsible for strategy and global partnerships.
- Moniek Hop, who served as the chief operating officer at Lytho, was named vice president of product and COO of EMEA operations. She will lead the integration of the two technology platforms worldwide.
- Kevin Williams was named as the chief customer officer and will have responsibility for sales, including customer growth and retention, along with customer experience.
- Brittany Pais was promoted to vice president of customer experience.
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