A Cambridge, Mass. technology company wants to use its data science expertise to help federal researchers fight against cancer.

Tamr sent a letter to the White House and offered free use of its big data platform. The White House’s Cancer Moonshot Task Force, led by Vice President Joe Biden, seeks to double the rate of progress in the fight against cancer through its $1 billion initiative. 

More than 1.6 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed and cancer will kill an estimated 600,000 Americans in 2016, according to White House officials.

Asked by CMSWire if the White House has responded, a Tamr spokesperson said the news has been "well received" but declined to provide additional details as "we sort through the requests."

Tamr's Nidhi Aggarwal, head of product and strategy, told CMSWire her company has "great individual and institutional passion for what the White House is attempting to do with the Cancer Moonshot Taskforce." 

Nidhi Aggarwal headshot

Andy Palmer, Tamr’s co-founder and CEO, served as the CIO at Infinity Pharmaceuticals and later as the global head of software and data engineering at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. 

"We have also helped several large biopharma customers with similar data integration and preparation challenges," Aggarwal said. "Further, we believe that while the volume and variety of shared ‘big cancer data’ may be the Moonshot’s most valuable asset, it’s also its biggest challenge. Organizations will need more effective ways of preparing and unifying this data for analysis, and that’s exactly what we do at Tamr."

How does Tamr see tech companies helping healthcare companies in the future?

"With the introduction of technologies that make it easier to manage and prepare large scale datasets for analysis," Aggarwal said, "there’s an opportunity for biopharma companies to better leverage their existing knowledge and investment, as opposed to it being a means to an end. As an example, clinical data associated with a specific treatment or drug may be used to accelerate other areas of research."

Intralinks Makes Cloud Acquisition

Intralinks, a global content collaboration company based in New York City, acquired Verilume, a Boston-based cloud infrastructure company. 

The acquisition will help Intralinks meet global data governance and security requirements. Verilume reduces the complexity of deploying and managing distributed cloud environments to deliver in-country or regional data locality and processing, company officials said. 

“Three years ago, the leadership team at Intralinks saw the global shift in data privacy regulation and realized that multi-national organizations would soon face enormous challenges regarding the sovereignty of their most sensitive content," Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Intralinks, said in a statement. 

He said the acquisition of Verilume advances Intralinks’ strategic vision and adds depth to Intralinks’ expertise.

HP Updates TeamSite

HP Software announced HP TeamSite 8.1, an update to its flagship digital experience management platform. HP TeamSite 8.1 introduces HTML2 Template, a capability that bridges the gap between design and development.

Marketers can grab web designs and convert them directly into TeamSite templates. HP TeamSite 8.1 also adds a new way to enhance mobile experiences with push notifications.

Sunil Menon, worldwide head of HP TeamSite, noted that the new release "extends our focus on usability and a strong mobile-first approach. We’re making it easier for businesses to quickly and easily build the engaging experiences that customers demand and respond to most successfully."

TeamSite 8.1 gives marketers a view into metrics through a new Google Analytics integration. This new dashboard in Experience Studio allows marketers to identify top-performing pages, resolve issues and improve engagement and conversions.

$20M for BetterWorks

Redwood City, Calif.-based BetterWorks, which provides enterprise collaboration software, closed a $20 million Series B investment round, led by Emergence Capital. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 8VC and other existing shareholders also participated. 

"BetterWorks is poised to become one of the next iconic enterprise companies," Jason Green, founder and general partner of Emergence Capital, predicted in a statement. "We believe the combination of its product vision, cadre of passionate enterprise customers and talented team will enable BetterWorks to break away from the competition in the employee engagement and emerging performance development domains."

group picture of betterworks team members

The company's customer list of 200-plus enterprise customers includes AOL, CVS Health, BMW, Schneider Electric, Airbnb and Shutterstock. 

Learning Opportunities

Interact Customizes Nonprofit Intranet Platform

New York City-based Interact released an exclusive platform tailored specifically to nonprofit organizations. 

Nigel Danson, CEO and founder at Interact, said in a statement that Interact Nonprofit Edition has "evolved into a best of breed technology, which unifies workers in the field with their headquarters and helps these organizations achieve their philanthropic goals.” 

Interact supports nonprofits, including March of Dimes, by helping them maintain accountability and transparency by documenting daily tasks, challenges and triumphs, officials said.

Informatica Releases Big Data Solution

Redwood City, Calif.-based Informatica, announced a new end-to-end solution to turn big data into trusted data assets. Informatica announced Big Data Management v10.1, to help organizations turn big data into business value by exploiting relationships between data, machines and people.  

“Business self-service data preparation with collaboration and governance controls is a key capability to increasing the agility of data-driven organizations,” Sridhar Potineni, executive vice president of information technology for customer Jones Lang LaSalle, said in a statement. He called big data management "an important foundation for the success of our modern data architecture and big data initiatives.” 

Informatica provides a solution that includes data ingestion, cleansing, transformation, matching, blending, governance, security and delivery.

TYPO3 World Debuts CMS 8.0

The TYPO3 Community has released TYPO3 CMS version 8.0, the first sprint release of the v8 series of TYPO3. 

"Even if the release of CMS 7 LTS from November 2015 wasn't too long ago, we worked hard on pushing the system to the next era," officials at the open source community said in a release.

A few highlights of the new version TYPO3 CMS 8.0:

  • Performance improvement through PHP 7 and support
  • UX: Integrated form builder
  • Standalone fluid

CloudCraze, Deloitte Digital Partner 

Chicago-based CloudCraze, an enterprise commerce platform built natively on Salesforce, welcomed the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platform as its latest B2B commerce solution partner. 

Deloitte Digital will build the technology, leveraging the APIs of both platforms via its MarketMix accelerator for the B2B industry. 

Ray Grady, executive vice president of CloudCraze, said in a statement, “We’ve reached a point in the evolution of commerce where buyers are expecting a B2C experience in the B2B environment. They want access to product reviews, rich content, and side-by-side comparisons of products as they shop. Brands are looking to agile, SaaS platforms to provide the customer-centric experience that the industry demands.”

Errol Denger, director of commerce at Adobe, said integrating Adobe Experience Manager with CloudCraze’s B2B commerce solution "will enable our joint customers to provide exceptional digital experiences across devices and global markets."

Title image "White House" (CC BY 2.0) by mikemol

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