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Adobe announces AI toolbox for Experience Platform
Most companies don’t have the personnel to do AI well, so they turn to platform vendors like Adobe for help. Like other platforms, it has been building AI into its product set for several years now, but wanted to give marketers a set of tools that take advantage of some advanced AI capabilities out of the box.
Today, the company announced five pre-packaged AI solutions specifically designed to give marketers more intelligent insight. Amit Ahuja, VP of ecosystem development at Adobe, says even before the pandemic, customers were struggling to deal with the onslaught of data and how they could use it to understand their customers better.
“There is so much data coming in, and customers are struggling to leverage this data — and not just for the purpose of analytics and insights, which is a huge part of it, but also to do predictive optimization,” Ahuja explained.
What’s more, we’ve known for some time that when there is so much data, it becomes impossible to make sense of it manually. Given that AI deals best with tons of data, Adobe wanted to take advantage of that, while packaging some popular data scenarios in a way that makes it easy for marketers to get insights.
That data comes from the Adobe Experience Platform, which the is designed to pull data not only from Adobe products, but from a variety of enterprise sources to help marketers build a more complete picture of their customers and get answers to key questions.
Customer Insights AI helps users understand their customers better. Image Credit: Adobe
The company is announcing a total of five AI tools today, two of which are generally available with the remainder in Beta for now. For starters, Customer AI helps marketers understand why their customers do what they do. For instance, why they keep coming back or why they stopped. Attribution AI helps marketers understand how effective their strategies are, something that’s always important, but especially in this economy where effectively deploying spend is more important than ever.
The first of the Beta tools is Journey AI, which helps marketers decide the best channel to engage customers. Content and Commerce AI looks at the most effective way to deliver content and finally Leads AI looks at the visitors most likely to convert to customers.
These five are just a start, and the company plans to add new tools to the toolbox as customers look for additional insights from the data to help them improve their marketing outcomes.
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How Adobe shifted a Las Vegas conference to executives’ living rooms in less than 30 days
Adobe was scheduled to hold its annual conference in Las Vegas two weeks ago, but the coronavirus pandemic forced the company to make alternate plans. In less than a month, its events team shifted venues for the massive conference, not once, but twice as the severity of the situation became clear.
This year didn’t just involve Adobe Summit itself. To make things more interesting, it was also hosting Magento Imagine as a separate conference within a conference at the same time. (Adobe bought Magento in 2018 for $1.6 billion.)
Originally, Adobe had more than 500 sessions planned across four venues on the Las Vegas Strip, with more than 23,000 attendees expected. Combining all of the sponsors, partners and Adobe personnel, it involved more than 40,000 hotel rooms.
Once it became clear that such a large event couldn’t happen, the company reimagined the conference as a fully digital experience.
Plan A
VP of Experience Marketing Alex Amado is in charge of planning Adobe Summit, a tall task under normal circumstances.
“Planning Summit is a year-round endeavor,” he said. “Literally within weeks of finishing one of those Las Vegas events we are starting on the next one, and some of the work actually is on an 18 or 24-month cycle because we have those long-term hotel contracts and all of that stuff.
“For the last 12 months, basically, we had people who were working on what we now call Plan A — and we didn’t know that we needed a Plan B and Plan C — and the original event was going to be our biggest yet.”
2019 Adobe Summit stage in Las Vegas. Photo: Ron Miller/TechCrunch
After the team began to wonder in January if the virus would force them to change how they deliver the conference, they started building contingency plans in earnest, Amado said. “As we got into February, things started looking a little scarier, and it very quickly escalated to the point where we were talking really seriously about Plan B.”
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Adobe Experience Manager now offered as cloud-native SaaS application
Adobe announced today that Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is now available as a cloud-native SaaS application. Prior to this, it was available on premises or as a managed service, but it wasn’t pure cloud-native.
Obviously being available as a cloud service makes sense for customers, and offers all of the value you would get from any cloud service. Customers can now access all of the tools in AEM without having to worry about maintaining, managing or updating it, giving the marketing team more flexibility, agility and ongoing access to the latest updates.
This value proposition did not escape Loni Stark, Adobe’s senior director of strategy and product marketing. “It creates a compelling offer for mid-size companies and enterprises that are increasingly transforming to adopt advanced digital tools but need more simplicity and flexibility to support their changing business models,” Stark said in a statement.
AEM provides a number of capabilities, including managing the customer experience in real time. Having real-time access to data means you can deliver the products, services and experiences that make sense based on what you know about the customer in any given moment.
What’s more, you can meet customers wherever they happen to be. Today, it could be the company website, mobile app or other channel. Companies need to be flexible and tailor content to the specific channel, as well as what they know about the customer.
It’s interesting to note that AEM is based on the purchase of Day Software in 2010. That company originally developed a web content management product, but over time it evolved to become Adobe Experience Manager, and has been layering on functionality to meet an experience platform’s requirements since. Today, the product includes tools for content management, asset management and digital forms.
The company made the announcement today at NRF 2020, a huge retail conference taking place in New York City this week.
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Adobe turns it up to 11, surpassing $11B in revenue
Yesterday, Adobe submitted its quarterly earnings report — and the results were quite good. The company generated a tad under $3 billion for the quarter, at $2.99 billion, and reported that revenue exceeded $11 billion for FY 2019, its highest-ever mark.
“Fiscal 2019 was a phenomenal year for Adobe as we exceeded $11 billion in revenue, a significant milestone for the company. Our record revenue and EPS performance in 2019 makes us one of the largest, most diversified, and profitable software companies in the world. Total Adobe revenue was $11.17 billion in FY 2019, which represents 24% annual growth,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told analysts and reporters in his company’s post-earnings call.
Adobe made a couple of key M&A moves this year that appear to be paying off, including nabbing Magento in May for $1.7 billion and Marketo in September for $4.75 billion. Both companies fit inside its “Digital Experience” revenue bucket. In its most recent quarter, Adobe’s Digital Experience segment generated $859 million in revenue, compared with $821 million in the sequentially previous quarter.
Obviously buying two significant companies this year helped push those numbers, something CFO John Murphy acknowledged in the call:
Key Q4 highlights include strong year-over-year growth in our Content and Commerce solutions led by Adobe Experience Manager and success with cross-selling and up-selling Magento; Adoption of Adobe Experience Platform, Audience Manager and Real-Time CDP in our Data & Insights solutions; and momentum in our Marketo business, including in the mid-market segment, which helped fuel growth in our Customer Journey Management solutions.
All of that added up to growth across the Digital Experience category.
But Adobe didn’t simply buy its way to new market share. The company also continued to build a suite of products in-house to help grow new revenue from the enterprise side of its business.
“We’re rapidly evolving our CXM product strategy to deliver generational technology platforms, launch innovative new services and introduce enhancements to our market-leading applications. Adobe Experience Platform is the industry’s first purpose-built CXM platform. With real-time customer profiles, continuous intelligence and an open and extensible architecture, Adobe Experience Platform makes delivering personalized customer experiences at scale a reality,” Narayan said.
Of course, the enterprise is just part of it. Adobe’s creative tools remain its bread and butter, with the creative tools accounting for $1.74 billion in revenue and Document Cloud adding another $339 million this quarter.
The company is talking confidently about 2020, as its recent acquisitions mature and become a bigger part of the company’s digital experience offerings. But Narayan feels good about the performance this year in digital experience: “When I take a step back and look at what’s happened during the year, I feel really good about the amount of innovation that’s happening. And the second thing I feel really good about is the alignment across Magento, Marketo and just call it the core DX business in terms of having a more unified and aligned go-to-market, which has not only helped our results, but it’s also helped the operating expense associated with that business,” he said.
It is no small feat for any software company to surpass $11 billion in trailing revenue. Consider that Adobe, which was founded in 1982, goes back to the earliest days of desktop PC software in the 1980s. Yet it has managed to transform into a massive cloud services company over the last five years under Narayan’s leadership.
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Adobe announces GA of customer data platform
The customer data platform (CDP) is the newest tool in the customer experience arsenal as big companies try to help customers deal with data coming from multiple channels. Today, Adobe announced the general availability of its CDP.
The CDP is like a central data warehouse for all the information you have on a single customer. This crosses channels like web, email, text, chat and brick and mortar in-person visits, as well as systems like CRM, e-commerce and point of sale. The idea is to pull all of this data together into a single record to help companies have a deep understanding of the customer at an extremely detailed level. They then hope to leverage that information to deliver highly customized cross-channel experiences.
The idea is to take all of this information and give marketers the tools they need to take advantage of it. “We want to make sure we create an offering that marketers can leverage and makes use of all of that goodness that’s living within Adobe Experience platform,” Nina Caruso, product marketing manager for Adobe Audience Manager, explained.
She said that would involve packaging and presenting the data in such a way to make it easier for marketers to consume, such as dashboards to deliver the data they want to see, while taking advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning under the hood to help them find the data to populate the dashboards without having to do the heavy lifting.
Beyond that, having access to real-time streaming data in one place under the umbrella of the Adobe Experience Platform should enable marketers to create much more precise market segments. “Part of real-time CDP will be building productized primo maintained integrations for marketers to be able to leverage, so that they can take segmentations and audiences that they’ve built into campaigns and use those across different channels to provide a consistent customer experience across that journey life cycle,” Caruso said.
As you can imagine, bringing all of this information together, while providing a platform for customization for the customer, raises all kinds of security and privacy red flags at the same time. This is especially true in light of GDPR and the upcoming California privacy law. Companies need to be able to enforce data usage rules across the platform.
To that end, the company also announced the availability of Adobe Experience Platform Data Governance, which helps companies define a set of rules around the data usage. This involves “frameworks that help [customers] enforce data usage policies and facilitate the proper use of their data to comply with regulations, obligations and restrictions associated with various data sets,” according to the company.
“We want to make sure that we offer our customers the controls in place to make sure that they have the ability to appropriately govern their data, especially within the evolving landscape that we’re all living in when it comes to privacy and different policies,” Caruso said.
These tools are now available to Adobe customers.
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Daily Crunch: Adobe launches Photoshop for iPad
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
1. Adobe Photoshop arrives on the iPad
Adobe has released Photoshop for the iPad, making good on an announcement that it made last October.
The tablet version of the popular photo-editing software is free to download, and includes a 30-day free trial. After that it’s $9.99 per month via in-app purchase, or you can get access as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
2. Cortana wants to be your personal executive assistant and read your emails to you, too
At its Ignite conference, Microsoft announced a number of new features that help Cortana to become even more useful in your day-to-day work, all of which fit into the company’s overall vision of AI as a tool that is helpful and augments human intelligence.
3. Apple commits $2.5 billion to address California’s housing crisis and homelessness issues
The investment includes a $1 billion commitment to an affordable housing investment fund, $1 billion toward a first-time homebuyer mortgage assistance fund and $300 million in Apple-owned land that will be made available for affordable housing.
4. A startup just launched red wine to the International Space Station to age for 12 months
The wine isn’t being sent just to help the ISS astronauts relax. Instead, it’s part of an experiment that will study how the aging process for wine is affected by a microgravity, space-based environment.
5. Lemonade gets a nastygram from Deutsche Telekom over its use of magenta, says it will fight
Deutsche Telekom’s German lawyers have sent a letter to AI insurance startup Lemonade, demanding it cease using magenta — a color that appears across Lemonade’s logo and marketing material — globally.
6. Where tech companies should look to expand
Zillow’s Cheryl Young says the company has analyzed data to determine the best markets that provide fertile environments for startups or tech companies looking to put down stakes for their next office.
7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts
On the latest episode of Equity, Alex and Kate discuss Sam Altman’s investment in Quill, a company that could eventually challenge Slack. And on Original Content, we review the Netflix series “Living with Yourself,” in which Paul Rudd plays two different versions of the same man.
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TikTok expands its influence to third-party apps with new developer program & SDK
TikTok is looking to expand its influence by integrating with popular third-party video creation and editing apps. The company today announced a new TikTok for Developers program which will introduce tools for third-party app developers, including those that allow them to access TikTok’s creative offerings as well as push content from their apps to TikTok directly. The first of these tools is the new Share to TikTok SDK, which will let users edit videos in other apps then publish them from that app to TikTok.
One of the key launch partners for the new SDK is Adobe Premiere Rush, Adobe’s mobile app for video editing. With the new TikTok integration, Premiere Rush users can access video editing features like aspect ratio switching, transitions, color filters, time lapse and slo-mo, audio control and more, then share instantly to TikTok and other video destinations.
In addition to Adobe, the apps supporting the Share to TikTok SDK at launch also include looping video creator Plotaverse, AR app Fuse.it, gaming highlights recorder Medal, Momento GIF Maker, PicsArt and Enlight Videoleop.
For some of the smaller, single-purpose apps, being able to become a useful tool for the creator community can have an outsized impact on their growth and revenues. For example, Facetune’s maker Lightricks has built a profitable business across its suite of photo and video editing apps, including Enlight Videoleap, and has now raised a total of $205 million.
In addition to built-in sharing features, apps that integrate with the new TikTok SDK will also gain access to a wider selection of creative tools, says TikTok.
But the apps will benefit in another way, too — when creators share their videos, they’ll include the specified partner hashtag along with the content. This will help to give the app the ability to gain exposure among even more TikTok users.
“This new Share to TikTok feature enriches the content available on TikTok, diversifies the types of videos users can discover, and offers more editing choices for users to explore in addition to TikTok’s built-in creative tools,” explained TikTok, in an announcement. “Most importantly, it gives users multiple avenues to create new original, high-quality content using platforms with exciting creative tools,” the company said.
The TikTok for Developers program also includes tools to embed videos on the web, and offers developer documentation, demos and more. The program’s terms of service restricts developers from collecting users’ personal data or other nefarious activity, and threatens developers’ access could be removed if terms are violated.
The news follows reports that the U.S. government has opened a national security review of TikTok owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, specifically with regard to its $1 billion acquisition of U.S. app Musical.ly.
TikTok didn’t say what other plans its has in store for the developers program, only that it will continue to expand access to its own creative tools further across the wider app ecosystem.
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Adobe’s Photoshop Camera is an AI-powered photo editor for your phone
Instagram and Snapchat have changed the way people look at photo editing. What was once a task limited to those with wildly expensive tools and years of training has become accessible to anyone with a smartphone. These apps and their filters aren’t going to replace Photoshop for the pros… but for people just looking to upload a quick selfie to their story, they’re Good Enough
.
Adobe realizes this, and now they’re looking to flex a bit.
This morning the company announced Photoshop Camera, an AI-driven photo-editing app for iOS and Android. Take a picture (or grab one from your camera roll), and Photoshop Camera will near-instantly analyze it and offer up a drawer full of potential enhancements, from basics like shadows/highlight tweaks, to more complicated things like swapping out the sky in a complicated cityscape.
It recognizes what’s in the photo — be it food, people or distant mountains — and bubbles the most relevant “lenses” (think filters) up to the top. All lenses and effects are non-destructive, so you can quickly roll back any changes it makes.
Powering the AI is years and years of data. Adobe has hundreds of millions of photos in its stock photo collection, along with the data on which of these photos people tend to buy and use. Perhaps most importantly, they have the tooling data on how photo editors take a picture and get it from point A to point B.
I saw the app in action last week. While it’s tough to gauge how well something like this works in a quick demo, the results I saw were pretty astounding. It took a solid but basic landscape photo and made it look like something out of a nature magazine. It took a photo of food on a table and, in a split second, identified which parts of the photo were food and tweaked just those regions to make the colors shine.
Adobe tells me that it’s working with artists — Billy Eilish, for example — to create custom filters and lenses. Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis also hinted to me at the possibility of limited-edition, region-locked lenses — like, say, those that only appear when you’re at a music festival or conference.
One catch: If you want to use the app anytime in 2019, you’ll have to get Adobe’s thumbs-up. It’s going to be in private “preview” mode until sometime in 2020, when it rolls out to everybody. You can sign up for the preview here.
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Meme editor Kapwing grows 10X, raises $11M
Kapwing is a laymen’s Adobe Creative Suite built for what people actually do on the internet: make memes and remix media. Need to resize a video? Add text or subtitles to a video? Trim or crop or loop or frame or rotate or soundtrack or… then you need Kapwing. The free web and mobile tool is built for everyone, not just designers. No software download or tutorials to slog through. Just efficient creativity.
In a year since coming out of stealth with 100,000 users, Kapwing has grown 10X, to more than 1 million. Now it going pro, building out its $20/month collaboration tools for social media managers and scrappy teams. But it won’t forget its roots with teens, so it has dropped its pay-$6-to-remove-watermarks tier while keeping its core features free.
Eager to capitalize on the meme and mobile content business, CRV has just led an $11 million Series A round for Kapwing. It’s joined by follow-on cash from Village Global, Sinai and Shasta Ventures, plus new investors Jane VC, Harry Stebbings, Vector and the Xoogler Syndicate. CRV partners “the venture twins” Justine and Olivia Moore actually met Kapwing co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven while they all worked at The Stanford Daily newspaper in 2012.
Need to edit a meme or video? Kapwing has all the resizing, GIF, & subtitle tools you need https://t.co/FXDjShlUTq pic.twitter.com/1fEHxGoboz
— Josh Constine (@JoshConstine) September 24, 2019
“As a team, we love memes. We talk about internet fads almost every day at lunch and pay close attention to digital media trends,” says Enthoven, who started the company with fellow Googler Eric Lu. “One of our cultural tenets is to respect the importance of design, art and culture in the world, and another one is to not take ourselves too seriously.” But it is taking on serious clients.
As Kapwing’s toolset has grown, it has seen paying customers coming from Amazon, Sony, Netflix and Spotify. Now only 13% of what’s made with it are traditional text-plus-media memes. “Kapwing will always be designed for creators first: the students, artists, influencers, entrepreneurs, etc. who define and spread culture,” says Enthoven. “But we make money from the creative professionals, marketers, media teams and office workers who need to create content for work.”
That’s why in addition to plenty of templates for employing the latest trending memes, Kapwing now helps Pro subscribers with permanent hosting, saving throughout the creation process and re-editing after export. Eventually it plans to sell enterprise licenses to let whole companies use Kapwing.
Copycats are trying to chip away at its business, but Kapwing will use its new funding to keep up a breakneck pace of development. Pronounced “Ka-Pwing,” like a bullet ricochet, it’s trying to stay ahead of Imgflip, ILoveIMG, Imgur’s on-site tool and more robust apps like Canva.
If you’ve ever been stuck with a landscape video that won’t fit in an Instagram Story, a bunch of clips you want to stitch together or the need to subtitle something for accessibility, you’ll know the frustration of lacking a purpose-built tool. And if you’re on mobile, there are even fewer options. Unlike some software suites you have to install on a desktop, Kapwing works right from a browser.
” ‘Memes’ is such a broad category of media nowadays. It could refer to a compilation like the political singalong videos, animations like Shooting Star memes or a change in music like the AOC Dancing memes,” Enthoven explains. “Although they used to be edgy, memes have become more mainstream . . . Memes popularized new types of multimedia formats and made raw, authentic footage more acceptable on social media.”
As communication continues to shift from text to visual media, design can’t only be the domain of designers. Kapwing empowers anyone to storytell and entertain, whether out of whimsy or professional necessity. If big-name creative software from Adobe or Apple don’t simplify and offer easy paths through common use cases, they’ll see themselves usurped by the tools of the people.
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Ten years after Adobe bought Omniture, the deal comes into clearer focus
Ten years ago this week, Adobe acquired Omniture for $1.8 billion. At the time, Adobe was a software company selling boxed software like Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop to creatives. Many people were baffled by the move, not realizing that purchasing a web analytics company was really the first volley in a full company transformation to the cloud and a shift in focus from consumer to enterprise.
It would take many years for the full vision to unfold, so you can forgive people for not recognizing the implications of the acquisition at the time, but CEO Shantanu Narayen seemed to give an inkling of what he had in mind. “This is a game-changer for both Adobe and our customers. We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets,” he said in a statement after the acquisition became public.
While most people thought that perhaps this move involved some sort of link between design and data, it would turn out to be more complex than that. Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at Real Story Group, tried to figure out the thinking behind the deal in an EContent column published a couple of months after it was announced.
“Going forward, I think the real action will continue to revolve around integrating management and metrics, less so than integrating design and metrics. And that’s why I also think that Adobe isn’t done acquiring yet,” It was pure speculation on Byrne’s part, but it proved prescient.
There’s something happening here
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