Big Data continues to attract a passionate amount of attention among consumers, media, and businesses. It also attracts intense attention among analytics, digital channels, and cloud based technologies. All these are attributable to the current technology megatrends. Big Data has enabled managers to measure and know more about their businesses. It enables business owners to improve their decision-making and performance. Big Data has the potential of transforming both traditional and current businesses as well.

Direct marketing has gone through a number of transformations over the years.

And while certain aspects have changed, strategically driven direct marketing is still as viable as ever in helping businesses attract today’s discriminating customers and meet their high demands.

Contrary to popular belief, the big data process isn’t a funnel. For whatever reason, we’ve come to think the more information we dump in from the top, the more actionable, quality insights will come out through the bottom. That just isn’t the case. We’re creating more data every day than any other point in history, but not all of this information is a golden opportunity. Most of it’s just noise. The real key to success is being able to navigate through the clutter and determine what pieces of information are pertinent.  

XMT™ reduces the gap between people and machines by introducing artificial intelligence to real-time translation

Wakefield, MA – May 13, 2015 – SDL (LSE: SDL) today introduced the next generation of machine translation technology – XMT, a core component of the Language pillar within SDL’s Customer Experience Cloud. This powerful technology will become an essential tool in bringing down the barriers of multilingual communication by providing a scalable infrastructure for the development and rapid deployment of real-time translation capabilities – a necessity in today’s multilingual world.

Last week, Andrew Embler announced the availability of concrete5 5.7.4. In his announcement, Andrew stated that this is so far concrete5's biggest release in 2015 and also the biggest release since launching 5.7 last year. 

Features found in concrete5 5.7.4 include:

Choose The Best Blogging Platform

While actually setting up a blog is easy, the process of starting one requires a few decisions that will impact the success of your online venture. For instance, what will be your niche? If you want to make money blogging, how will you monetize your blog? Should you use a free blogging platform or choose to self-host your site?

The psychological theory of the Paradox of Choice states that the presence of too many options causes cognitive distress and often results in less than optimal decisions being made. Given the pure number of tools, platforms, features and functionality that comprise today’s Digital Marketing landscape, the selection process can be overwhelming. So what should you really care about when assessing tools and making technology selections? Let’s look at why your search should start, and end, with tools that boast a decoupled architecture.

Experience Management

Last week, when WordPress announced that Version 4.2 was available, I planned to take my time upgrading my site. Then I saw this from theme developer Photocrati in my Google Stream:

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