Gigya’s technology provides new capabilities to consumers across channels and touchpoints, builds rich intelligent profiles and creates a consent-based approach to personalization across sales, service, and marketing. Gigya, an SAP Hybris partner since 2013, has customers already using a solution extension from SAP Hybris and Gigya. This acquisition will enable the teams to further build upon this existing relationship.

The company’s customer identity management platform states to help companies build digital relationships with their customers. Its platform allows companies to manage customers’ profile, preference, opt-in and consent settings, with customers maintaining control of their data. Customers opt-in and register via Gigya’s Registration-as-a-Service, which addresses changing geographical privacy issues and manages compliance requirements such as the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“Gigya brings a wealth of skills and expertise that will significantly enhance the SAP® Hybris® Profile solution and allow us to take leadership of the emerging customer identity and access management market,” said Carsten Thoma, President and Co-founder, SAP Hybris.

“Consumer trust is the main currency to succeed for customer-driven organizations. This is what Gigya is known and recognized for.”

With this acquisition, SAP Hybris intends to become the first organization to offer a cloud-based data platform enabling companies to profile and convert new customers, gather accurate conclusions from disparate consumer engagement sources and collect data for enhanced consumer choices that are in line with regulations.

“Combining the data matching and enrichment capabilities of SAP Hybris Profile with Gigya’s consent-based identity data and access management platform will allow us to identify consumers across channels and offer a robust single consumer profile,” said Patrick Salyer, CEO, Gigya.

“This is a vital step for digitalizing businesses because companies need to be able to draw accurate conclusions seamlessly across all channels, including web, mobile, in-store or connected devices, and the Internet of Things, as well as collect data about consumer preferences. Together, we are uniquely positioned to drive more effective marketing, sales and service through data, while the customer stays in control of how much data is shared.”

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Over the past year, justAd’s main business was in the playable ads arena, where most of the biggest games and brands participated in its beta offering.

“Playable and interactive ads hold a huge amount of promise, but the technical difficulty involved creating them has limited their use so far. justAd’s solution solves this problem, and democratizes this technology for brands of all sizes,” said Itamar Benedy, CEO, Glispa.

“This acquisition represents one more step on our way to building a more comprehensive solution for our clients, and is a real game changer. We’re very excited to fold this into our existing products and to begin rolling it out,” Benedy added.

justAd’s solutions will integrate into a variety of existing Glispa products including Glispa’s native programmatic ad exchange Avocarrot as well as Glispa’s performance network. It will also integrate with Glispa’s proprietary Data Management Platform (DMP) to gather and provide high quality first party data and provide the most up-to- date consumer insights.

“I would like to thank all of our loyal customers who are working with us for such long time. We are extremely excited to join the great team at Glispa, with significantly more resources than we had until now. This deal will allow us to take our platform to a whole new level, with much more innovation in it,” said Yariv Erel, Co-founder and CEO, justAd.

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This is Freshwork’s ninth acquisition in the last two years, including the acquisition of chatbot startup Joe Hukum in July this year. The company says that the latest acquisition will help it to focus on building marketing solutions for businesses of all sizes.

“Acquiring Zarget will enable Freshworks to support customers with the pre-acquisition journey as well and truly transform the way our customers attract and engage with their prospective customers. Also, I have known the Zarget team for many years and I am personally thrilled to have them join the Freshworks family and power our expansion into the marketing software category,” said Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshworks.

Founded in 2015 by former Zoho executives Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar, Chennai-based Zarget offers tools to businesses and marketers to understand user behavior on websites. Mathrubootham, and some of the early employees were angel investors in Zarget. It later raised $7.5 million over two rounds from Accel Partners, Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital India.

“We built Zarget to help marketers make informed decisions on their online properties without the need for deep technical resources or large budgets. Together with Freshworks, we expect to accelerate the digital marketing evolution and help our customers further transform the way they market with combined expertise and solutions,” said Arvind Parthiban, CEO, Zarget.

Through this acquisition, Freshworks seeks to further develop Zarget’s marketing suite and provide the team with expertise, technology and operations as well as access to over 120,000 customers.

“Today, our software powers customer engagement across every aspect of the customer journey, from customer acquisition to customer support. Acquiring Zarget will enable Freshworks to support customers with the pre-acquisition journey as well and truly transform the way our customers attract and engage with their prospective customers,” Mathrubootham added.

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Post acquisition, Scyfer’s team and founder Max Welling, who is also a professor at the University of Amsterdam, will be joining Qualcomm Technologies. According to the semiconductor giant, Welling will help to further advance AI research and development. He will continue his role as a professor at the University of Amsterdam, and the rest of the Scyfer team will continue to be based in Amsterdam.

About two years back, Qualcomm Technologies and the University of Amsterdam also established QUVA, a joint research lab focused on advancing the machine learning techniques for mobile and computer vision.

“We started fundamental research a decade ago, and our current products now support many AI use cases from computer vision and natural language processing to malware detection on a variety of devices — such as smartphones and cars — and we are researching broader topics, such as AI for wireless connectivity, power management and photography,” said Matt Grob, Executive Vice President, Technology, Qualcomm.

Qualcomm claims to be focusing on implementation of AI on end devices such as smartphones, cars and robotics to ensure that processing can be done with or without a network or Wi-Fi connection, rather than the execution of AI in the cloud. It states that with the direct implementation, on-device AI can give immediate response, enhanced reliability, increased privacy protection, and efficient use of network bandwidth.

Apart from the acquisition, earlier this week Qualcomm Technologies also announced an expansion to its Spectra Module program. The program was launched last year designed to help customers accelerate time to market for devices with advanced camera technology and quality.

The program is capable of improved biometric authentication and high-resolution depth sensing, designed to meet growing demands of photo and video for a broad range of mobile devices and head mounted displays (HMD).

“Whether used for computational photography, video recording, or for computer vision applications that require accurate motion tracking, it’s clear that power efficient camera image signal processing has become more important for the next generation of mobile user experiences,” said Tim Leland, Vice President, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies.

“Our breakthrough advancements in visual quality and computer vision, combined with our family of integrated Spectra ISPs for Snapdragon, are designed to support an ecosystem of cutting edge mobile applications for our customers.”

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According to media reports, Senosis Health had recently come out of stealth mode and developed three applications to monitor Hemoglobin, Lung health and early jaundice screening, using the inbuilt functions of the phone such as camera, flash, accelerometer and microphone.

For example the HemaApp uses the phone’s camera and flash to check the Hemoglobin count. Conditions such as malnutrition, pulmonary illness and anemia, can cause fluctuations in the hemoglobin levels.

SpiroSmart and SpiroCall apps use the microphone to measure the lung function. While SpiroSmart turns the microphone into a spirometer SpiroCall provides the option to call a toll free number that to check the same – extended to those who are not having a smartphone. By turning the microphone into a spirometer, the app can screen for asthma, pulmonary illness or cystic fibrosis.

Another app BiliCam uses the camera to screen for newborn jaundice disease. Instead of looking for pale skin the app looks for amounts of bilirubin in the blood by examining wavelengths of light absorbed by the skin.

According to the company, the apps can not only be used for screening but also help monitor nutritional well being in communities exterminating the need of expensive blood draws. Also the apps are able to deliver immediate results and eliminate the reservations about sample contamination and infection.

As of now Google’s plan with Senosis Health is unknown and how will it fit into the company’s growing health-tech portfolio has not been established. The parent, Alphabet, has invested in various bio-tech and health-tech firms since the last few years. Recently its life-sciences division Verily invested in Freenome, a bio-tech startup that is developing tools to detect early stage cancer. Lift Labs was also acquired and incorporated in Verily. Google has also launched DeepMind Health last year to create a suite of applications that will help doctors identify illness and conditions quickly.

According to reports from GeekWire, this is not Patel’s first venture, prior to setting up Senosis, he has been the founder of Zensi, an energy monitoring solutions provider that was acquired by Belkin in 2010. He has also another startup venture to his name called WallyHome sensor technology that detects changes in moisture, temperature, and humidity, which was bought by Sears in 2015.

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Google claims that the speech recognition will also support ancient languages such as Georgian (first spoken in 430AD approx.), and also adding Swahili and Amharic, which are two of Africa’s largest languages. It will also be adding many Indian languages such as Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali among others, in a bid to make the internet more inclusive.

Interestingly Google states that it went a step further for the language integrations by working with native speakers for collecting speech samples, asking them to read common phrases.

“This process trained our machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and to improve their accuracy when exposed to more examples over time,” said Daan van Esch, Technical Program Manager, Speech, Google.

Apart from this update the company has also introduced voice dictation for emojis in US English. Now people in the US speaking English can say “smile faced emoji” instead of typing the symbol or selecting the emoji from the repository. The company states that it will be bringing this to more languages and locations soon.

Looking at the enterprise side of the update, Google Cloud Speech API was launched in beta last year to improve speech recognition for everything from voice-activated commands to call center routing to data analytics. After getting feedback that consumers want more functionality and control, the company has announced features that expand support for long-form audio and extension for language support to help customers inject AI into their businesses.

Another feature that Google has provided is word-level timestamps – which lets the user jump to the moment in the audio where the text was spoken, or display the relevant text while the audio is playing – time offsets (timestamps) are useful for analyzing longer audio files, where the user may need to search for a particular word in the recognized text and locate it in the original audio.

Talking about longer audio, Google has also increased the length of supported audio files from 80 minutes to up-to 3 hours. Additionally, the files that are longer than 3 hours could be supported on a case-by-case basis by applying for a quota extension through Cloud Support, states the company.

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Continental specializes in tyres, brake systems, interior electronics, automotive safety, powertrain and chassis components, tachographs, as well as intelligent systems for transport companies. Quantum on the other hand has an integrated suite of mobility applications, enterprise logistics and analytics platforms that caters to individual consumers, corporate institutions and governments.

Upon closing of the deal, Quantum Inventions will add to Continental’s growing intelligent transportation systems portfolio with its city data including next generation navigation systems that are highly responsive to real-time information such as traffic data, road incident information and dynamic road pricing.

About 120 employees working in Quantum’s three offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and its development center in India will be joining the German automotive giant. However, Quantum Inventions will remain operationally independent and help Continental further expand into Asia.

“Asia continues to play an ever increasing role in our strategy. Initiatives such as the Park & Go real time parking application for Singapore, our recent joint venture with China Unicom, strategic cooperation with Baidu, and now the purchase of Quantum Inventions underline our focus on developing mobility services solutions. We are excited to provide an expanded portfolio of customized solutions in the dynamic mobility services market,” said Helmut Matschi, Executive Board Member and Head, Interior Division, Continental.

The company claims that information management is at the core of Continental’s Interior division. The product portfolio for different types of vehicles includes: instrument clusters, multifunctional and head-up displays, control units, access control and tire-information systems, radios, infotainment systems, input devices, control panels, climate control units, software, cockpits as well as services and solutions for telematics and Intelligent Transportation Systems.

“We are proud to be a part of Continental. With our combined strengths in the area of intelligent transportation systems, we are poised to provide a strong value proposition to customers, both OEMs and Cities, around the world,” said Saurav Bhattacharyya, CEO, Quantum Inventions.

Quantum’s solutions are based on its proprietary data technology platform which provides connected navigation, traffic and transportation intelligence, high-speed dynamic routing computation algorithms, and real-time probe data processing and analysis. The company has three business lines; Automotive, Telematics and Intelligent Mobility.

Ralf Lenninger, Head, Business Unit Intelligent Transportation Systems, Continental said, “Continental plans to double its current sales with mobility services by 2020. This alliance brings Business Unit Intelligent Transportation Systems a step closer to its goal of creating products, systems and solutions which, by 2025 will ensure 20 million better cars, better mobile lives for 25 million consumers and 20 better cities.”

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“We are thrilled to bring the ClearGraph team to Tableau to enable people to ask questions of their data using natural language,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Tableau.

“Natural language queries will make it easier for more people to interact with Tableau, whether you’re an executive who needs an answer quickly, or on a mobile phone and want an answer from your data on the move. We’re excited about this acquisition as the ClearGraph team shares our mission and is aligned with our innovation perspectives on conversational analytics,” Ajenstat added.

Founded in 2014 by Andrew Vigneault and Ryan Atallah, ClearGraph helps in analyzing data using natural language. It brings a consumer-like experience to users by connecting disparate data sources and making them accessible and intelligible through simple conversational style search. It’s natural language query technology stores semantic data in knowledge graphs that can expand and learn over time.

“We founded ClearGraph because we saw a need to bridge the gap between humans and computers through natural language, especially when it comes to exploring data. Tableau is a natural fit for us because we have similar missions, cultures and genuine desire to help more people around the world access, interact with and get answers from their data,” said Andrew Vigneault, CEO, ClearGraph.

The startup claims that accessing and analyzing data using ClearGraph requires no technical training, as the system can infer users’ intent through natural language. For example, people could ask questions such as, “Total sales by customers who purchased staples in New York,” then filter to, “orders in the last 30 days,” then group by, “project owner’s department.”

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CCI delivers channel incentive management services, and focuses on optimizing  Market development funds (MDF), joint marketing, incentive, and OEM funds – in the telecom, software and hardware industries. The company also offers services and support, such as program administration, global payments and expert guidance.

“Our decision to bring CCI under Zyme’s umbrella follows our vision to offer customers smart, data-driven applications to help them sell more through the channel while keeping their channel management costs down,” said Chandran Sankaran, CEO, Zyme.

With the acquisition of CCI, Zyme aims to provide the most functional channel incentives solution on the market. It will enable the company to provide advanced channel incentives including rebates, price protection and deal-registration (ship and debit) programs as well as MDF and co-op, along with overall program design and payment services – and links all of these with channel performance data to enable a unique, high-value solution for customers.

In May 2017, Zyme had announced enhancements to its Cloud Platform 3.0. and the acquisition of channel marketing and sales consulting firm, Foster MacCallum. The new version and updates were aimed at helping enterprises sell their products more effectively through the channel with less investment. With the acquisition, the company planned to add partner assessment and recruitment services to its CDM platform.

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According to an official communication, SiteLock, with this acquisition will be able to have a global footprint and expand its threat database. It will also be able to extend its services to the hosting provider community.

Read More: Cyber threats have been evolving, why hasn’t security education?

“The vision of Patchman aligns with SiteLock very well. We’re excited to join forces and execute on our shared goal of securing every website on the internet,” said Neill Feather, President, SiteLock.

“This acquisition will double the number of websites we protect, allowing us to increase our knowledge base, better identify malware patterns and more effectively mitigate threats. In addition, we can now provide more options for hosting providers around the world to work with us, and ensure high quality solutions are available to their end customers.”

Founded in 2008, SiteLock claims to protect over 12,000,000 websites worldwide.

With the addition of Patchman, the websites’ security company will now have more than 500 global partners, including Host Papa, UK2 Group and more. Patchman was founded in 2014.

“The Patchman team is thrilled to join forces with SiteLock, as combining our unique technologies presents many new and exciting opportunities,” said Wouter de Vries, Founder of Patchman. “We look forward to accelerating our already impressive growth and continuing to deliver top notch web security solutions worldwide.”

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