AdRoll is applying machine learning to ad targeting for direct-to-consumer brands. Its new Brand Awareness Solution lets users combine their company’s own data with AdRoll’s second and third party data, using machine learning to target the best prospects via contextual, demographic, interest, look-alike, retargeting, or email campaigns.
WordPress.com parent Automattic has raised a $300 million Series D with Salesforce Ventures as the sole investor. It’s a vote in favor of open source, freemium, and, according to the company, in “the future of work”. Raise you hand if you doubted that work had a future.
Meanwhile, testing platform Optimizely released Performance Edge, which executes experiments at the edge of the network rather than within a user’s browser. This speeds things up, giving average web experiment response times under 50 milliseconds. That’s fast.
Customer engagement platform MessageGears will partner with content localization and translation platform Smartling to streamline email translation and localization for 450+ languages. The workflow is automated but actual translations are still done by (machine-assisted) humans.