Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is impressing the tech community with his endorsement of Google’s Gemini Live, an AI voice assistant. He praised it on social media, noting its zero latency and calling it the “future of consumer AI.” This accolade reflects his ongoing exploration of AI technologies, particularly in consumer applications. Gemini Live’s integration into everyday tasks positions it as a contender against established assistants. Benioff’s criticism of Microsoft’s Copilot for failing to meet expectations further highlights the divide in AI offerings.

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Gemini Live: Benioff’s endorsement and user experience

In a recent post on X, Benioff expressed his excitement for Gemini Live, stating, “Just downloaded Gemini Live, and I’m absolutely blown away.” He highlighted its performance, emphasizing “zero latency,” which refers to the instant response the AI provides when engaged in conversation. He encouraged others to try it, praising the work of Google CEO Sundar Pichai as “truly groundbreaking.”

Benioff’s enthusiastic feedback follows his criticisms of Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, which he previously described as “disappointing” and compared unfavorably to the defunct Clippy. He noted, “Microsoft has really disappointed so many of our customers,” criticizing the disparity between the hype surrounding their AI solutions and actual performance.

With the release of Gemini Live as a mobile app, which became available on the App Store recently, iOS users can now access Google’s latest AI technology directly on their smartphones. The AI assistant responds dynamically to voice commands, enabling users to engage in natural conversations.

Gemini Live vs. ChatGPT vs. Copilot

Gemini Live joins OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot in the competitive market for AI chatbots. Each boasts unique functionalities, operating under different frameworks. During an interaction with Business Insider, Gemini Live provided a detailed, conversational explanation as to why San Francisco experiences fog, something its counterparts did in a similar vein but with minor variances in delivery.

While Gemini and ChatGPT’s approaches are relatively parallel regarding casual inquiries, Copilot is more geared toward productivity tasks, serving a different niche in the market. Each assistant has limitations, including the propensity to produce inaccuracies or “hallucinations.”

During Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, Benioff discussed using ChatGPT primarily for personal reflection, humorously stating it worked “mostly as my therapist.”

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As Geminis Live continues to gain traction, anticipation grows surrounding its integration with Apple Intelligence features. Industry speculation, particularly from tech analysts like Mark Gurman, suggests that while Google plans to collaborate with Apple for Gemini integration, it may take time. The expectation is that the integration might not occur until next year, especially as Apple appears to be granting OpenAI a temporary exclusivity window following their recent partnership to bring ChatGPT to iOS.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s software executive, conveyed his hopes for incorporating Google’s Gemini chatbot into Apple Intelligence, but with no immediate timeline confirmed, users may have to wait for further updates.

In the meantime, Google has launched a standalone app that allows iPhone users to access Gemini capabilities, positioning it as a direct competitor to other AI assistants.

Benioff, who has refrained from commenting directly on the planned integration, remains a significant voice in promoting AI advancements, emphasizing their role in reshaping consumer technology.

Continued developments in AI technology, especially with high-profile endorsements like Benioff’s, are essential in understanding the competitive landscape. As companies like Google and Apple explore formal integrations and features, the AI assistant market is poised for significant evolution, catering to consumer needs with greater immediacy and contextual awareness.

Featured image credit: Salesforce

Salesforce is continuing its intense growth in AI and data management by announcing its purchase of Israeli startup Zoomin for $450 million. This deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2025, signifies Salesforce’s promise to increase its AI capabilities, with a special focus on unstructured data—a major resource for modern AI applications.

Zoomin’s role in Salesforce’s AI vision

Founded in 2016 by Gal Oron, Hannan Saltzman, and Joe Gelb, Zoomin has made considerable progress in arranging and allowing access to unstructured data for AI engines and autonomous systems. So far, the startup has secured close to $70 million from backers like Bessemer Venture Partners, Viola Growth, General Atlantic, and Salesforce Ventures. The client list includes major corporations, such as Dell, McAfee, and Mastercard, as well as fast-food heavyweights like Burger King and Popeyes.

“We’re both humbled and excited to join forces with Salesforce. It’s a natural progression of our long-standing and evolving partnership,” said Zoomin CEO Gal Oron. “As organizations are accelerating their enterprise AI transformation, our joint mission is to support them and make sure AI doesn’t hit the data wall. As part of the #1 AI CRM, we will allow customers to leverage their existing enterprise data in ways they never imagined possible.”

Strengthening Agentforce with Zoomin’s technology

The buyout represents Salesforce’s second key acquisition of an Israeli enterprise this month after acquiring Own, another data management firm, for $1.9 billion. Zoomin’s technology integration into Salesforce’s Data Cloud and Service Cloud platforms is already underway, and Zoomin ambitions to broaden its capabilities across all Salesforce solutions. The integration is foreseen to strengthen Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, designed to innovate in customer service through autonomous AI agents that can accomplish sophisticated decision-making.

“Proprietary unstructured data is powerful fuel our customers can use for AI agents and customer experiences, and Zoomin’s proven expertise and technology will accelerate Data Cloud’s innovation and enable our customers to get better value from Agentforce,” said Rahul Auradkar, EVP & GM of Unified Data Services & Einstein at Salesforce.

The agreement occurs when the enterprise AI ecosystem is swiftly evolving, with businesses like Microsoft and Google focusing heavily on their AI features. Through its buyout of Zoomin, Salesforce aims to present more comprehensive and dynamic AI solutions, particularly in customer service application automation and data insight techniques. Experts contend this action directly answers the hurdles posed by competitors like Microsoft’s Copilot, with Salesforce wanting to provide a more capable and autonomous AI experience.

Zoomin’s platform specializes in processing substantial amounts of technical material from various sources within organizations. It permits companies to make tailored replies at all customer engagement points—whether on home portals, websites, support centers, or even within products. This platform automatically generates insights and suggestions based on user behavior and content consumption patterns, making it a useful resource for firms that wish to bolster their digital transformation activities.

“We’re both humbled and excited to join forces with Salesforce. It’s a natural progression of our long-standing and evolving partnership,” said Gal Oron, Zoomin CEO. “As organizations are accelerating their enterprise AI transformation, our joint mission is to support them and make sure AI doesn’t hit the data wall. As part of the #1 AI CRM, we will allow customers to leverage their existing enterprise data in ways they never imagined possible.”

The acquisition draws attention to the necessity of overseeing unstructured data in AI applications. Zoomin’s integration is helping Salesforce boost its data management capabilities while also preparing for more sophisticated AI applications that can deal with the challenging aspects of business situations. The upgraded Agentforce platform is forecasted to advance customer service automation, sales forecasting, and marketing campaigns through improved use of unstructured data.

Salesforce and OpenAI are collaborating to create Salesforce Einstein GPT, which will help companies by giving them instant chat summaries, tools for research, and writing assistance. Not limited to Slack, Einstein GPT uses generative AI to make personalized content for every Salesforce cloud. This can make every employee more productive and improves the customer experience for everyone.

Are you new to artificial intelligence? Don’t worry, there’s still time to hop on the AI train, like Salesforce. The $250 million Generative AI Fund from Salesforce Ventures will help startups and the development of responsible generative AI. Don’t be scared of AI jargon; we have created a detailed AI glossary for the most commonly used artificial intelligence terms and explain the basics of artificial intelligence as well as the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence. Anyway, do you think ChatGPT for Slack is a good idea? Let’s explore!

Salesforce Einstein GPT: ChatGPT for Slack, aka Slack GPT, explained

Salesforce released Einstein GPT today, which is the world’s first generative AI CRM technology. It uses AI to create content for all sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interactions, and it can do this at a very large scale. Moreover, you use it on Slack. Some people have already started to call it Slack GPT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAsKRxXdyj0

Einstein GPT, which works with Salesforce Data Cloud and is integrated into all of their clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, is another way that they are giving all of their customers access to the future of AI. At launch, they will also integrate with OpenAI.

“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated, and personalized ways.”

– Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce

Salesforce is combining OpenAI’s enterprise-grade ChatGPT technology with Salesforce’s private AI models to create content that is both relevant and trustworthy. That’s why people called it Slack GPT.

“We’re excited to apply the power of OpenAI’s technology to CRM,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “This will allow more people to benefit from this technology, and it allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of AI — a belief that Salesforce shares with us.”

Businesses will be able to use their Salesforce CRM data to make “trusted” content with the help of AI. For example, it could automatically send emails to coworkers and customers, make visuals from certain data sets, and generate code for developers designing online customer journeys. Do you want to learn more use cases? Keep reading…

Salesforce Einstein GPT features

These are some of the best Salesforce Einstein GPT features:

• Salesforce Einstein GPT for sales: Generate sales activities, including emailing, meeting scheduling, and other ready work automatically.
• Salesforce Einstein GPT for service: Create informative pieces by mining past case notes. Improve client satisfaction with fast, individualized service by having chat responses generated automatically for your agents.
• Salesforce Einstein GPT for marketing: With a data-driven personalization engine, you can develop unique content for email, mobile, online, and advertising that will attract and retain customers.
• Salesforce Einstein GPT for Slack Customer 360 apps: Intelligently summarizing sales prospects and highlighting user actions like upgrading knowledge articles are just two examples of how AI-powered customer insights may be delivered in Slack. That’s one of the reasons that people call it Slack GPT.
• Salesforce Einstein GPT for developers: Use an AI chat assistant to produce code and ask questions for languages like Apex, all with the help of Salesforce Research’s proprietary large language model.
• ChatGPT for Slack, built by OpenAI: Salesforce and OpenAI have introduced their ChatGPT for Slack app today. The app now has artificial intelligence-powered discussion summaries, research tools to learn about any topic, and a writing aid to compose messages swiftly. It is also called Slack GPT.

More than 200 billion AI-powered predictions are delivered daily throughout Customer 360, and Einstein GPT is the next generation of Salesforce’s Einstein artificial intelligence platform. Moreover, clients may leverage natural-language prompts on CRM data to activate potent, time-saving automations and create personalized, AI-generated content by merging proprietary Einstein AI models with ChatGPT or other leading large language models.

How to use Salesforce Einstein GPT?

Check out the video below and learn how to use Salesforce Einstein GPT from Mayukh Bhaowal, Senior Director at Salesforce.

For detailed information, visit Salesforce.

Learning how to use AI is a game changer

It is currently in closed beta. So, unfortunately, you have to wait to use Slack GPT.

Einstein GPT is definitely a big deal, and it will be interesting to see how these different Salesforce users take advantage of it.

Other AI tools we have reviewed

Almost every day, a new tool, model, or feature pops up and changes our lives, like Bing AI mobile, and we have already reviewed some of the best ones:

• Text-to-text AI tools
  • Google Bard AI 
  • Chinchilla
  • Notion AI
  • Chai
  • NovelAI
  • Caktus AI
  • AI Dungeon
  • ChatGPT

Do you want to learn how to use ChatGPT effectively? We have some tips and tricks for you without switching to ChatGPT Plus! AI prompt engineering is the key to limitless worlds, but you should be careful; when you want to use the AI tool, you can get errors like “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” and “too many requests in 1-hour try again later”. Yes, they are really annoying errors, but don’t worry; we know how to fix them.

• Text-to-image AI tools
  • MyHeritage AI Time Machine
  • Reface app
  • Dawn AI
  • Lensa AI
  • Meitu AI Art
  • Stable Diffusion
  • DALL-E 2
  • Google Muse AI
  • Artbreeder AI
  • Midjourney
  • DreamBooth AI
  • Wombo Dream
  • Tome AI
  • Interior AI
  • NightCafe AI
  • QQ Different Dimension Me
  • Random face generators

While there are still some debates about artificial intelligence-generated images, people are still looking for the best AI art generators. Will AI replace designers? Keep reading and find out.

• Other AI tools
  • Poised AI
  • Make-A-Video
  • Uberduck AI
  • MOVIO AI
  • Nvidia Eye Contact AI
  • Tome AI
  • Spotify AI DJ

When you think of the field services and maintenance industries, it’s likely that big data & cutting edge tech don’t spring to mind. Far from slick, up-to-the-minute tech and data-optimised logistics on the backend, many service technicians are still doing everything by the book, literally- many smaller enterprises haven’t yet even digitised their workflow and records. Adding big data magic to this industry is a daunting challenge to say the least, but one that Coresystems have taken up with relish. We recently spoke to CEO Philipp Emmenegger about Coresystems came to settle on this particular market, and what the future looks like for both Coresystems and the field services market at large.

Give us a brief introduction to Coresystems’ key product.

We deliver a FSM (Field Service Management) solution from the cloud. The advantage that comes along with our solution is its architecture with the possibility to access various ERP simultaneously. All kinds of industries can use the app to automate their service processes, e.g. it is possible to dispatch service technicians, but also to see the stock of spare parts and order parts directly from the app. It is a way to keep all the information in one place, which again helps to provide great customer service. For larger accounts that experiences many M&As and therefore live with a variety of ERP backend we can smoothly integrate them.

You started out created SAP add-ons, and today boast over 120,000 users- talk us through your roadmap/journey.

When we started to develop our SAP add-ons we didn’t know how much impact they would create in the market. The first version has been developed solely for our own use. We simplified the reporting capabilities within SAP and used it for all our printouts and marketing documents. However, it soon became very popular within Switzerland and we thought: Why not distribute it in other countries, too? – So we did. After two years of single-handed distribution, we started to build a reseller-channel. That was our break through, since we were able to sell our products to almost all industries without being experts in them. The more we grew the better our products became. It took us roughly 10 years to find out where we achieved a real difference: in the field service market. We developed a “plug and play” connector for SAP that allows us to get a running project in less than a week. This way it is also affordable for all our clients.

How significant has big data disruption been to field services so far? What would you say to field services that have yet to adopt big data- or perhaps even any kind of digitised workflow?

The impact is not that great at the moment. Everybody talks about it, but hardly anyone has realized any solutions so far. Currently there is a discussion, but there aren’t too many initiatives. However, we believe the big data flow will massively influence field service management and its stakeholders in the coming 12 to 18 months already.

Could you describe the technology you use to operate Coresystems?

We use a couple of components that make our FSM solution complete. In the frontend we use iOs or Android clients that interact with our cloud. The cloud itself is a multi-stack linux environment that exposes a state of the art API. Depending on the backend we than code a connector on .Net technology or Java.

How do you differentiate yourself from other competitors on the market?

Nowadays almost every competitor delivers the same feature set. That brought us to the idea to differ in the following two areas:

1) backend connectors >> we are able to connect our solution to a heterogenic ERP landscape without headache
2) the user experience for service technician >> we focus on the experience that a service technician has NOT on the dispatching like most of our competitors

There are companies that have thousands of service technicians. Imagine for example a company that is building turbines and needs to repair them. Usually there are several service technicians involved in this process. They need to collaborate and need to be up-to-date on what has been done and what still needs to be done. Our application facilitates this kind of collaboration and safes companies a lot of money, because they can have the turbine up and running much quicker with our field service management tool. Another thing we are good at it the fact that our cloud is also available offline. If you are on an oil platform or in the Sahara you are most likely not connected to a network, but you can still use our application.

Your tech is cloud-based; cloud adoption is widespread, but far from universal at this point. What do you foresee in the future of cloud computing?

Generally we see that the ERP becomes less and less important. There is a trend to move into “best of breed” products (e.g. Salesforce for CRM). The ERP is about to be “reduced” to accounting only. However, the movement toward best of breed products happened primarily with regard to cloud products. Our prediction is that in 5 years from now what has previously been stored in the ERP will move into the cloud. This means there will be a CRM cloud, a service cloud, a HCM cloud and an infrastructure cloud. It’s crucial that all the clouds can talk to each other. This is why we believe that SAP, Microsoft or Oracle as full-service providers are doomed to lose market shares.

Your marketing and web design focuses a lot around two key elements- customer service, and a sense of theatre/spectacle. Talk us through why you decided these two elements ought to become integral parts of your brand.

Our current website will be redesigned soon. However, the circus is how we encounter the FSM today. It’s a bunch of different acts that need to be managed.

Are you currently looking for funding, or aiming to hire any particular talent at the moment?

We are looking for roughly 10 developers. On the funding front we are fine for the moment having raised 10 million Swiss Francs in September 2014. However, expanding in the US might lead for a new round of investment in order to build up a powerful sales team.

All images courtesy of Coresystems.

Yesterday, Onalytica released their report, announcing the top 100 big data influencers, and top 100 influencing brands, based on analysis of the #BigData hashtag on Twitter. The study analysed 403,185 #BigData tweets from 69,894 users, and used their unique influencer identifying technology to determine these users’ social clout.

Whereas many technologies designed to determine influence place heavy emphasis on the number of followers a brand or individual possesses, Onalytica take a much more dynamic approach. Influence is determined not only by the number of followers and level of engagement, but the quality of those followers & shares. Onalytica’s influencers are key players in the larger influential network in their domain, meaning their voice is amplified by the quality of their community.

Top 5 Big Data Influencers

Based on Onalytica’s research, the top 5 big data influencers on Twitter are:

1. Jeremy Waite– It’s no surprise that Jeremy Waite- a man with 2 decades of brand consultancy and marketing experience- topped the list. He is currently the Head of Digital Strategy, Marketing Cloud EMEA for CRM juggernauts salesforce. His “80 Rules of Social Media” is a must-read for anyone with a social media brand; number 7 is our personal favourite.

2. Bernard Marr- Bernard Marr is a bestselling business author, strategic consultant, Dataconomy contributor and all-round fountain of knowledge within the big data space. If you don’t follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn already, we highly recommend you start.

3. Kirk Borne- Kirk Borne is a data scientist, PhD Astrophysicist, Dataconomy contributor and big data influencer. If you’ve read a great big data story today, there’s a 90% chance Kirk has already tweeted about it.

4. Kenneth Cukier- Kenneth is The Economist’s Data Editor, and his social media accounts are a treasure trove of insightful data-related projects and articles. He also co-wrote “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think” by Dataconomy interviewee Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, who appears at number 6 on the list.

5. Gregory Piatetsky- Gregory is the President of KDNuggets, who have been covering innovations in the fields of analytics, data mining and big data for almost 20 years. They were, to our knowledge, the first media platform dedicated to big data, and have remained at the forefront ever since.

Top 5 Big Data Brands

1. IBM Big Data- The Twitter account of IBM’s Big Data Division is a masterclass in big data branding. Their Twitter feed effortlessly blends promotion of IBM’s latest innovations with fascinating stories from the big data field.

2. BigDataEXPO- It’s no surprise that one of the biggest big data events on the planet is also one of the most influential social brands on Twitter. You need only scroll down their Twitter feed to see how highly and consistently engaged their community is.

3. CIO.com- A company that needs no introduction, @CIOonline is great resource to keep up-to-date with the latest developments from big data and beyond, across a wide spectrum of technologies.

4. World Bank- The fact that an organisation whose mission is to combat poverty on a global scale appears so high on this list makes for compelling evidence that Big Data for social good is firmly on the agenda.

5. Cloudera- Cloudera is the leading enterprise Hadoop vendor, whose seriously impressive funding and innovations in 2014 proved Hadoop is still a technological heavyweight in the big data space. If you need further evidence that Cloudera have their finger on the pulse of big data, be sure to check out our interview with their Director of Data Science on the future of machine learning. 

Be sure to check out the full list of Big Data Influencers here.

All images courtesy of Onalytica.

Selligy, a sales tools innovator, has revealed in its 2014 Sales Analytics Survey that the sales industry is on the cusp of a data-driven revolution, early last week.

“Most sales leaders have been staring at the same CRM reports for a decade, and this survey shows that a wave of change has started,” points out Nilay Patel, Selligy CEO and co-founder, “Sales leaders have always valued hustle. Now they’re starting to measure it.”

The survey declares that, “CRM cloud analytics is crossing the chasm,” as a major fraction of firms have deployed cloud analytics or are in the planning process of doing it. It turns out that 46 percent of respondents at Dreamforce either already have (19.2 percent) or plan to implement (27.3 percent) new cloud analytics with their CRM within the next year.

However, 16.5 percent would probably not implement cloud analytics in the next year and 37 percent needed more information before any action in this regard.

Selligy’s study of CRM data found that 79 percent of sales records in typical CRM systems have no data tracking the activities the salesperson performed as a result, companies can’t use CRM data to perform basic analyses of what (and who) is working in sales engagements, reports a press release announcing the survey.

Early adopters of cloud analytics have started to address these “long-standing data gaps.” Respondents that plan to use new sales analytics tools within the next year are also those who most often require their salespeople to log calls (73 percent), emails (69 percent) and tasks (70 percent) into CRM.

Apparently the data-driven sales revolution influences the accuracy of sales forecasts as well as the management of sales performance, pointing to a significant gap between the needs of sales leaders and current CRM data.

Selligy believes that apart from tracking “what salespeople did last week,” organisations will need cloud analytics tools to help optimize the sales process by guiding salespeople while improving strategy of sales performance for sustained competitive advantage.

Dreamforce 2014, saw Selligy conduct the survey on the floor to find that investment in cloud analytics has started to take off, and that the companies leading the charge are also addressing a long-time CRM blind spot: the sales process.  It further points out that data-driven sales methods can dramatically alter how teams are managed by leaders.

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(Image credit: Salesforce)

Companies offering cloud-based analytics platforms have received considerable attention over the past few years and it is undeniably a hot place to be today. Take the release of Oracle RightNow Analytics Cloud last week, as an example of this, or GoodData’s recent funding announcement. SalesForce is also preparing an analytics cloud plan, which is rumoured to be announced next week. Given the extreme shift towards cloud analytics, companies in this space have to offer something unique to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

In an attempt to do just this, SAP and Birst today announced that they will extend their partnership to combine SAP HANA’s Cloud Platform with Birst’s analytics capabilities. Branding it as instant analytics offering, the partnership is aimed at addressing a key enterprise problem in the market right now– that is, the speed at which companies can ingest data from different sources.

Birst’s analytics engine builds a user-ready data store in SAP HANA that can deliver visual discovery, dashboards and enterprise reports across a single business model, accelerated by SAP HANA. Crucially, however, the solution will be designed to provide instant analytics across on premise and cloud data sources like salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP and Hadoop.

Speaking to Dataconomy about the announcement, SAP said, “Leveraging the power of the HANA platform, we think Birst can have a much more scalable and performance solution. Ultimately, the partnership will allow Birst to drive real-time capability, provide better integration with SAP and non-SAP solutions, and ultimately provide more customer choice.”

To understand how the partnership will really differentiate Birst’s cloud analytics offering from other companies like Oracle and Salesforce, Brad Peter’s told us that they have been developing their product so that people do not have to make significant compromises like they would with other providers like Oracle or Salesforce.

“Doing analytics in the cloud is not easy, you cannot decide overnight that you want to do it. Everyone who does that has typically made some very significant compromises that will inevitably limit your ability to do real enterprise calibre analytics.”

“In the case of Oracle, it’s simply a hosted database that looks more like an ASP than a cloud offering and this is something we need to keep in mind, whether it’s really cloud or not,” Brad continued.

“When it comes to Salesforce’s offering next week, I’m sure it will be flashy insofar as the simple problems it deals with around Salesforce-only data. But when you deal with richer Enterprise data that needs to be brought together form different sources that’s a much more challenging problem that I think the Birst and HANA is uniquely suited for.”

Image Credit: SAP

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Salesforce, the cloud computing innovator has unveiled Wave, an Analytics Cloud – the sixth cloud in the Salesforce Customer Success Platform – that will enable companies to access – explore and visualise – their data on Salesforce.

“Wave is the first cloud analytics platform designed for every business user,” claims the press release, enabling exploration of data, new insights and quick action from any device. Sales, service and marketing analytics becomes readily available and building custom mobile analytics apps, using any data source is easier.

“The data revolution is creating new opportunities for companies to create deeper, more meaningful connections with their customers,” notes Alex Dayon, president, Products, Salesforce. “The Wave Analytics Cloud eliminates the painfully slow, complex and unintuitive legacy approaches that have long separated business users from their data—finally, there are analytics for the rest of us.”

Wave release was not a surprise, notes Jordan Novet of VentureBeat. With the acquisition of BI software startup EdgeSpring last year, the company tapped EdgeSpring technology for search-indexing capabilities for Wave, Anna Rosenman, director of the analytics cloud, told VentureBeat in an interview.

Combined with Salesforce experience and effort, they came up a “new product that’s intuitive enough for any person to use,” Novel wrote.

“It’s not to be sitting on the shelf, static, siloed, and away from individuals,” Rosenman added, “It’s here to inform us, so we can make the right decisions going forward.”

Companies like Accenture, Deloitte Digital and Informatica are part of over 30 outfits that have become Wave ecosystem partners. Data-driven companies like Equinix, GE and TriCore Reference Laboratories have vouched for the “scale and speed of Wave to know their customers in a whole new way.”

Read more here.

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(Image credit: Sunova)

Philips, the Dutch healthcare and lighting company, announced on Thursday it would be partnering with Salesforce to build a cloud-based platform that will connect healthcare providers, insurers and healthcare consumers.

Philips has built two applications on the platform, eCareCoordinator and eCareCompanion that will become available in the summer. The former will present the most relevant patient data to the clinician, flag problems and provide comms links to other healthcare professionals and the patient, while the latter is designed as a tablet app for patients to log information about their health and keeps track of health data from connected devices like blood pressure monitors, smart watches and scales.

“We have entered a new transformative era for healthcare, and technology is enabling the industry to connect to, care for and engage with patients and each other in a profound new way,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Together with Philips, we are creating an open health platform and ecosystem to benefit everyone that cares about one of the most important issues of our time.”

Although companies like Apple, Google and Samsung have tried to make headway in the healthcare industry, their efforts have been geared towards wearable devices containing consumer health data. What Philips and Salesforce have announced is much broader than this; the new partnership is focussed on collecting clinical data too. The aim, Benioff claimed, is to “eliminate boundaries between hospital and homes and enable collaboration between patients and doctors.”

The initial focus of the partnership will be on “at-risk” patients, which include seniors and those with chronic illnesses. The two companies will sell the aforementioned technologies to healthcare organizations (like Banner Health) to manage chronic ailments more efficiently, which account for 7 of every 10 deaths, and for 75 percent of healthcare costs in America.

Read more here

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(Image Credit: Flickr)

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InsideSales.com, a company specialising in could-based sales acceleration technology, announced today that it has raised $100 million in series C funding. Polaris Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the funding round, with participation from Salesforce, Acadia Woods, EPIC Ventures, Hummer Winbald, U.S. Venture Partners and Zetta Venture Partners.

InsideSales.com provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) to more than 1,000 customers, including large enterprises like Microsoft, Fidelity, Groupon and Marketo. The company sits in between marketing automation services like Eloqua and Marketo and CRM vendors like Salesforce and Microsoft. The aim of InsideSales.com is to use resources from both of these fields to help sales teams become more effective in their operations.

“Customers, partners and investors frequently ask us what our secret sauce is,” InsideSales.com CEO and founder Dave Elkington said in a statement. “Our secret sauce is our scientific approach to sales. We use data as a strategic weapon to systematically improve sales performance and drive sales growth for our own company and for customers who want to maximize revenue growth.”

The company, which started in Utah in 2004, announced 107% growth last year. To continue expanding their operations, the new investment is expected to help the company move into new markets, hire engineers, coders, data scientists and sales people.

Read more on the story here

(Image Credit: Thomas Hawk)