Skip to main content
In Business Technology Platform, Berlin, Tel Aviv

Can Artificial Intelligence Take The Guesswork Out Of The Customer Journey?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is shedding light on one of the most examined yet least understood experiences of modern life: the customer journey. From shopping malls and sports arenas, to train stations and city streets, C2RO is an AI-powered video analytics platform that captures anonymized data about people’s movement so organizations can improve the customer experience.

“We analyze human behaviour in physical spaces, and transfer it into actionable data,” said Tim Heaney, vice president of sales at C2RO. “With a fact-based understanding of the amount of people coming into a space, how they move through it with whom, where they linger, and what they touch and eventually purchase, organizations can manage physical environments more efficiently to improve the customer experience and business results.”

Real-time data eases commuter experience

A transportation organization used data from C2RO to improve subway train and bus terminal planning.

“Based on the number of people boarding and leaving trains at certain times and days, as well as which direction they’re headed at terminals, transportation managers could alleviate traffic crunches,” said Heaney. “They could reverse escalator directions to help people more easily exit or enter terminals. Aligning vehicle dispatches to actual passenger traffic flows reduced wasted trips. It also means fewer people waiting in the cold or forced to stand in crowded cars and buses.”

Real-time data is particularly valuable to manage other operations such as shopping malls and entertainment venues during peak usage times like rush hour, holiday shopping, or performances. Companies can also use historical data for future planning.

Heaney added that monitoring in-person occupancy levels has helped organizations meet social distancing mandates during the pandemic.

Read More…

In Singapore, Supply Chain Management

H3 Dynamics Launches World’s Most Advanced Drone Charging Station

H3 Dynamics announces the launch of DBX-G7, a brand new vertiport system for autonomous drone operations. Smarter, faster, and multi-modal with 5G and 4G, DBX was designed to scale on-going digitization efforts in safety compliance, maintenance and crisis management. Applications range from smart cities across Asia to various types of industrial sites worldwide.

Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, DBX-G7 is a direct response to the new tele-presence and remote work paradigm. DBX performs all the functions of an on-site drone pilot: navigation, docking, stowing, battery charging, data retrieval, transmission, and cloud-based processing. Autonomous systems such as DBX help reduce the need for on-site presence, and can help alleviate rising labor shortage pressures.

“With accelerating digitization, the need for structural scans is also growing while pilot availability is limited. We are looking to close the gap with our DBX autonomous drone stations.” Says Samuel Chauffaille, head of H3 Dynamics’ robotics systems division.

H3 Dynamics has been deploying its AI-enabled digital inspection solutions to address the many thousands of high-rise buildings that require regular inspections in Singapore, most of which use using piloted drone operations. The company has expanded its solution through strategic partnerships, including on a SAP connectivity to send repair work orders directly from H3 Dynamics’ digital platform (see video). Enterprise software giant SAP and H3 Dynamics are now working together on an increasing number of industrial use cases.

Full Article found at : H3 Dynamics Launches World’s Most Advanced Drone Charging Station – UASweekly.com

 

 

In Paris, HR & People Engagement

Massive Raise by 360Learning Breaks Open Corporate Training: The Creator Economy Arrives

This week 360Learning, a fast-growing collaborative learning company, received an astounding $200 Million of investment. Only a few years ago this would have been incomprehensible, but now it makes sense. This is a company that has unlocked the Creator Economy in corporate training, and the impact could be massive. Let me try to explain.

The corporate training market is huge: over $260 Billion is spent on employee skills each year. Companies train front-line workers, nurses, drivers, and other essential workers and simultaneously spend millions of dollars on technology skills, professional skills, and more. Compliance and safety training itself is more than a $20 Billion industry and programs for leaders and executives often cost tens of thousands of dollars per person.

Corporate training has been built around the paradigm of teaching. Instructional designers and consultants build courses or programs; they package them into online or workshop formats; then they deliver and sell them to others. It’s very similar to the “publishing model” used in books. It takes months to build a course, then people consume it (or buy it) for many years to come.

The problem, of course, is that this model is slow. The content gets out of date, media standards keep changing (TikTok is the newest paradigm), and employees need up-to-date content. So while billions of dollars are spent on packaged content, much of it never gets used. (We’ve looked at the utility of packaged courseware and it turns out almost 80% of licensed content is never used.  In fact our research with large companies found that internally developed content is up to six times more valuable than off-the-shelf published content.)

There are ways of making published content valuable. In our academy (The Josh Bersin Academy) we “always surprise the learner,” by creating programs that always change from page to page. We use a cohort-based design so people learn from their peers. And we use exciting videos and other entertainment pieces to keep people excited.

But despite all these good ideas, more than 70% of all corporate training is developed internally, and these publishing models don’t keep up. Witness the fall in Coursera’s stock over the last few months, as buyers and investors realize so much of that content isn’t as useful as we thought.

Well thanks to innovators like 360Learning, this is all about to change. And that’s why the company is growing so fast.

Read More…

In Paris, Funding Announcement, HR & People Engagement

360Learning Raises $200M in Funding

People mingling in conversation

360Learning, a NYC- London, UK and Paris, France-based SaaS global collaborative learning company, raised $200m in growth funding.

The round, which brought total raised to over $240m, was led by Sumeru Equity Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Silver Lake Waterman with participation from existing investors Bpifrance Large Venture, XAnge and Educapital.

The company will use the funding to:

  • grow the team to over 500 people by the end of next year driven by hires in innovation, engineering and product;
  • expand internationally across North America, Asia, Europe and South America; and
  • invest in strategic M&A.

Led by Nick Hernandez, founder, and CEO, 360Learning provides a platform that empowers learners to build their own skills, create courses in as few as 17 minutes and share knowledge throughout the business. The company also leverages AI to analyze data sets created from collaborative learning interactions and applies these insights to help learning communities identify what courses are missing or need to be improved, speed up course delivery, ensure learners find courses tailored to their immediate needs and keep growing through constant learning.

Read More…

In Tel Aviv, CRM & Customer Experience

Explorium Now Available on SAP® Store, External Data Platform

Explorium announced that its External Data Platform is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. The platform automatically discovers thousands of relevant data signals and uses them to improve analytics and machine learning, helping data scientists, business analysts and sales and marketing teams optimize data-driven campaigns.

Explorium’s External Data Platform integrates with the SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Customer Data Cloud solutions to help improve sales and marketing efforts for customers. The platform enables businesses to gain instant access to relevant external datasets such as business ratings/reviews, footfall traffic, point of interest data and geospatial data (zip code population, nearby competitors, nearby vacancies). Customers can quickly enrich their predictive models and deploy them in just a few keystrokes, with the assurance that all data is compliant with current regulations.

“With the Explorium platform, customers can increase revenue, streamline operations, reduce risk and automate external data integration into their modeling pipeline,” said Omer Har, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Explorium. “We’re constantly growing our universe of quality, relevant external data, and expanding our platform to serve as a single access point for all enterprise-level business intelligence and machine learning needs.”

Explorium works with global brands in the consumer goods, media and advertising, fintech, eCommerce and retail industries. Companies like GlassesUSA, BlueVine, OnDeck and Behalf use Explorium to enhance AI models for use cases including lead scoring, identifying default risk and fraud, and upleveling analytics such as demand forecasting and customer lifetime value.

Read More…

In Berlin, Tel Aviv, Business Technology Platform

Anticipate & Track Global Cultural Shifts with NWO.ai | Now available on SAP Store

SAP Data Intelligence, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Technology Platform customers can now turn unstructured data into insight with NWO.ai‘s platform that aggregates, analyzes, and produces actionable reports on human-generated data.

Check out Consumer Intelligence by NWO.ai on SAP Store 

The Industry Problem

As consumer behavior and habits change abruptly (as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic), companies cannot keep up and make sense of the vast amount of external data created every single day.

NWO.ai’s Solution

NWO.ai uses diverse data sets and views them in context to define trends as they emerge and evolve in relative terms. NWO.ai’s platform shows how a product, company, trend, or concept increases/decreases in its saturation within a global context with regards to mindshare, using news, social commentary, and searches.

Read More…

In Funding Announcement, Paris

Wakeo Raises $11M in Series A Funding

Wakeo, a Paris, France-based global leader in real-time visibility for overseas transport, raised $11M USD in Series A funding. Backers included 360 Capital and Promus Ventures, through its Orbital Ventures fund. The company intends to use the new to further invest in their ETA calculation models, continue to develop more added-value features, and accelerate international growth.

Led by co-founder and CEO Julien Cote, Wakeo leverages a worldwide network of hundreds of sources including shipping lines, airlines, carriers, ERP, TMS, as well as satellites, terminals, or IoT devices to provide real-time visibility for overseas transport. The platform integrates a data engine crossing those multiple data sources, powered by AI algorithms, to provide intelligent ETAs that anticipate disruptions and deliver customers’ promises.

Read More…

In Singapore, Funding Announcement, Supply Chain Management

H3 Dynamics closes US$26M Series B to introduce long-range hydrogen-air logistics solutions

Singapore-headquartered advanced aerial mobility company, H3 Dynamics Holdings, has completed its US$26 million Series B investment round led by Japan’s SPARX Mirai Creation Fund (backed by Toyota Motor and SMBC).

Singapore’s EDBI, ACA investors, Capital Management Group, the Grosvenor Group, Audacy Ventures, Ascent Hydrogen Fund, and French strategic investors ATEQ also joined the round.

“Our investors recognise that this is a long journey and that we must first address our immediate markets while solving key technical and regulatory challenges before adding more complexity,” said H3 Dynamics founder and CEO Taras Wankewycz.

In June 2019, e27 reported that the startup was in the process of closing a US$16 million Series B round, led by SPARX Mirai Creation Fund.

Read More…

In Bangalore, CRM & Customer Experience, Announcements

Vonage : Adds Conversational Commerce Solution To Its Product Portfolio With Acquisition Of Jumper.ai

Vonage, a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, today announced that it has acquired Jumper.ai, a Singapore-based leader in omnichannel conversational commerce solutions.

Jumper.ai’s team will join Vonage’s Product and Engineering group. With this acquisition, Vonage gains significant technology and developer-focused talent, as well as expertise in conversational commerce, complementing the programmable, flexible and intelligent capabilities of its singular Vonage Communications Platform and robust portfolio of APIs.

Conversational commerce is an in-demand retail trend that capitalizes on the growing convergence of shopping and conversations on platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, using the chat feature to create a seamless shopping experience. Consumers can engage in personal conversations to inquire about product and pricing information and build trusted relationships with retailers.

The Jumper.ai platform creates omnichannel, messaging-first customer engagement and shopping journeys across social, messaging, and web (WhatsApp, Messenger, Apple Business Chat, Instagram, Twitter, SMS, LINE, Google Ads, Brand websites, and more). According to an April 2021 Conversational Commerce forecast by Juniper Research1, the total addressable market in this space will be worth $27 billion by 20251. As social messaging becomes more important to consumers across the globe as a quick and direct way of connecting with their favorite brands, Vonage will incorporate Jumper.ai technology to expand its total addressable market and complement its robust portfolio of APIs with a packaged AI-enabled conversational commerce offering.

Read More…

In New York, CRM & Customer Experience

LISNR Customer Connect Now Available on SAP® Store

LISNR today announced that its LISNR Customer Connect solution is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and their partner offerings. LISNR’s Customer Connect merchant wallet solution utilizes near field ultrasonic with SAP Commerce to deliver a way for attendants to easily connect on-premise customers to their digital profiles.

SAP Store, found at store.sap.com, delivers a simplified and connected digital customer experience for finding, trying, buying and renewing more than 1,800 solutions from SAP and its partners. There, customers can find the SAP solutions and SAP-validated solutions they need to grow their business. And for each purchase made through SAP Store, SAP will plant a tree.

Read More…

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

How startups can help to create a positive impact on society and business

A good product is no longer enough to win a customer. Sustainability has become the new compass for companies worldwide and has gained enormous importance over the years.

“There is no doubt that sustainability is a key piece of the strategy of most successful companies moving forward, if not all of them,” said Gunther Rothermel, Head of SAP S/4HANA Sustainability.

This increased focus on sustainability has impacted both consumer behaviour and employer branding. According to a global report from The Economist Intelligence Unit and the World Wildlife Fund, global online searches for sustainable goods have increased by 71 percent increase over the last five years, triggering what’s been called an “eco-awakening.”

Not only that, but employees are placing more value on finding responsible and sustainable employers. The global pandemic has only accelerated this demand for sustainable actions, a sense of urgency for businesses to improve their sustainability credentials.

 

What customers want

For customers on their journey to build a more sustainable enterprise, there are three goals to keep in mind:

Software technology can help with these challenges by collecting, analyzing, and providing insights based on that data.

But no company, government, or country will solve the greatest challenges of our time alone. To succeed, companies need to collaborate across value chains, build alliances, and work together with governments and academia.

Global challenges require global solutions

The partnership between SAP and Accenture shows what is possible when two leading companies join forces to help their customers stay ahead of this global transformation.

Together, SAP and Accenture launched the “Sustainable Future” accelerator program with 13 selected startups from eight countries at the SAP.iO Foundries Berlin and Munich. The joint program aimed at helping early-stage B2B startups drive digital transformation and innovation in four target areas: carbon tracking and trading, resource efficiency, climate risk tracking and mitigation, and the circular economy.

“The ‘Sustainable Future’ cohort represents an innovation engine, meant to be leveraged by customers,” said Stephanie Guimbellot, Managing Director and Global SAP Sustainability Lead at Accenture, during a panel discussion at the closing Demo Day.

This collaboration is the latest in a series of initiatives from Accenture and SAP that help businesses support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and capture value from sustainability.

“We are entering the decade of action,” Guimbellot said, adding that today’s companies need to modify their business models to have a real impact on sustainability. “Technology will be an absolute must to reach the SDGs.”

This also means that startups are crucial in this process, across all industries.

“Sustainability will be an ecosystem where startups play an important role as they complement existing offerings with specialized technology,” she said.

How startups can help accelerate the sustainability journey

During the Demo Day, startups Astraea, Carbon Minds and Footprint had the chance to present their solutions and first projects with customers.

Astraea hails from Charlottesville and leverages unique big data from air quality sensors to geospatial analysis for real-time insights and workflow automation toward climate risk tracking and mitigation. In a first integration case with SAP’s Industry Cloud for Agriculture, Astraea will focus on providing satellite-derived data and indexes by field to enable seasonal planning on field level reflecting upcoming growing cycles.

Founded in Cologne, Carbons Minds provides integrated capabilities for holistic steering and reporting that helps companies measure, reduce, and offset CO2 emissions across their supply chain. The team is currently planning a project with a global pharmaceutical company to identify emission hotspots, find efficient mitigation options, and support the sustainable product development.

The third startup which showcased its superpower at the Demo Day was Berlin-based Footprint. Their software allows online shoppers to measure their feet with their smartphones and order the right shoe size, reducing returns, costs, and emissions. As part of their SAP.iO journey, Footprint is exploring collaboration opportunities with a German shoe and fashion retailer in SAP Commerce Cloud.

Check out the other ten startups that were part of the “Sustainable Future” program:

Stay tuned for more exciting customer projects and integrations coming out of this cohort. If you are a startup and want to participate in one of the upcoming SAP.iO programs, learn more and apply now!

About SAP.iO
To learn more about how SAP.iO is helping innovators start up and scale with SAP, please visit https://sap.io/.

In Fund, Business Technology Platform

BigID Announces SAP Endorsed Apps Certification for its Discovery-in-Depth Data Insight Platform

BigID, a leader in data management for privacy, security, and governance, today announced that the Discovery-in-Depth Data Insight Platform, a cloud native solution, is a certified SAP endorsed app available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings.

SAP Endorsed Apps are developed by independent software vendors that have been endorsed to support and complete SAP’s vision to help customers become best-run intelligent enterprises. Solutions awarded with this premium certification go through in-depth technical testing, measurements against benchmarks results, and due diligence that meets stringent requirements in a customer environment.

“We’re thrilled to expand our relationship with SAP to include our subscription-based, cloud-native solution as a premium certified SAP endorsed app,” said Dimitri Sirota, CEO and Co-Founder of BigID. “BigID and SAP serve some of the largest and most global organizations in the market today. These companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of data sources across the enterprise, and BigID helps SAP offer businesses a solution to manage data for privacy, security, and governance.”

The Discovery-in-Depth Data Insight Platform provides additional access to various BigID Apps for Privacy, Security and Data Governance, available upon request, as well as provides extended  data source coverage to include SAP® SuccessFactors®. BigID also offers an on-premise solution, called SAP Data Mapping and Protection by BigID

Read More…

In Paris, Network & Spend Management

Archlet Sourcing Optimization App Now Available on SAP® Store

Today, Archlet announced that its Archlet Sourcing Optimization App is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. The API connector integrates with SAP® Ariba®solutions and enables advanced sourcing analytics and scenario optimization capabilities for customers.

“By making Archlet’s sourcing analytics and optimization capabilities available to customers on SAP Store, businesses get access to best-in-class capabilities that further enhance the ROI of their investment into SAP Ariba solutions. Customers can now easily analyze and model sourcing scenarios that include sustainability, risk or supplier diversity scores, while maintaining a single source of truth within the SAP Ariba solution,” says Tim Grunow, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Archlet.

Using the Archlet Sourcing Optimization App to enhance SAP Ariba allows clients to …

  • increase the sourcing data quality with automated error and outlier detection,
  • reduce tender cycle times by eliminating manual Excel-based analysis,
  • highlight negotiation opportunities on a supplier level for improved savings delivery, and
  • make holistic sourcing decisions that reflect business constraints and requirements.

SAP Store, found at store.sap.com, delivers a simplified and connected digital customer experience for finding, trying, buying and renewing more than 1,800solutions from SAP and its partners. There, customers can find the SAP solutions and SAP-validated solutions they need to grow their business. And foreach purchase made through SAP Store, SAP will plant a tree.

Read More…

In Tel Aviv, CRM & Customer Experience

Social commerce examples: The power of social influence for online selling

In-app purchasing on social media is convenient. Not only do you have access to millions of potential customers, you can sell to them without disrupting their social experience. That’s the main advantage.

However, this benefit also has a downside. Are consumers truly looking to shop when on social media? One would argue that higher shopping intent would exist in the actual online store. On social media, people are generally looking to connect with friends and family, hear about the latest news, watch humorous and/or inspiring videos, and gain initial top-of-funnel interest in products that would lead them to enter a shopping environment, the online store.

Read More…