logo
#

Latest news with #MattNelson

James Hardie Partners With Pahlisch to Expand Northwest Reach
James Hardie Partners With Pahlisch to Expand Northwest Reach

Yahoo

time23-05-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

James Hardie Partners With Pahlisch to Expand Northwest Reach

James Hardie Industries plc JHX unit — James Hardie Building Products Inc. — has announced an exclusive three-year strategic partnership with Pahlisch Homes, a premier homebuilder in the Pacific Northwest. Under this agreement, Hardie siding and trim will become the default exterior solution across all of Pahlisch's new residential developments in the region. This alliance is a key move to deepen James Hardie's market penetration in a high-growth territory while aligning with a brand that prioritizes long-term homeowner value. James Hardie's reputation as the No. 1 siding brand in North America is built on the performance, durability, and design flexibility of its fiber cement products. These attributes resonate strongly with Pahlisch Homes' commitment to building communities that offer enduring aesthetic and structural value. Pahlisch CEO Matt Nelson emphasized that the collaboration reflects a shared vision for innovation and quality, highlighting that the agreement is not merely a supply deal but a strategic alignment of agreement reinforces James Hardie's strategy to grow through targeted partnerships and regional expansion. The deal not only secures long-term product adoption across a respected builder's pipeline but also enhances brand visibility in a lucrative geographic corridor. It exemplifies James Hardie's focus on embedding itself deeper into the residential construction value chain—a move likely to drive volume growth and strengthen pricing power in a competitive market. James Hardie shares have lost 23.5% over the past three months, underperforming the Zacks Building Products - Miscellaneous industry's 8.8% decline. Macroeconomic uncertainty, affordability concerns, and deflation in the home remodeling market continued to suppress large-ticket R&R spending. Multifamily construction also remained deeply challenged, and interior product volumes suffered from softness in discretionary remodeling. Additionally, raw material inflation, particularly in pulp and cement, impacted margins, although mitigated by pricing and operational savings. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research Looking into fiscal 2026, James Hardie's management expects continued macro headwinds and projects a mid-single-digit decline in North American market volumes. Nonetheless, it anticipates modest net sales growth in the region due to above-market volume performance and price realization, particularly in ColorPlus. The merger with AZEK is also expected to drive commercial synergies, expand addressable markets, and accelerate top-line growth. Despite near-term challenges, JHX remains confident in achieving long-term EBITDA margin expansion and generating more than $1 billion in free cash flow Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings per share (EPS) has declined to $1.57 from $1.60 over the past seven days, depicting analysts' concern over the company's prospects. The estimated figure indicates 5.4% year-over-year growth in 2025. James Hardie currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).Some better-ranked stocks from the Construction sector are Sterling Infrastructure, Inc. STRL, EMCOR Group, Inc. EME and Gibraltar Industries, Inc. presently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). The company delivered a trailing four-quarter earnings surprise of 11.5%, on average. The stock has surged 67.8% in the past three months. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks Zacks Consensus Estimate for Sterling's 2025 sales indicates a decrease of 1.7%, and the same for earnings implies an increase of 38.5% year over year. EMCOR currently holds a Zacks Rank #2. The company delivered a trailing four-quarter earnings surprise of 22.8%, on average. The stock has gained 17.1% in the past three consensus estimate for EMCOR's 2025 sales and EPS implies an increase of 13.3% and 9.8%, respectively, from a year ago. Gibraltar currently carries a Zacks Rank #2. The company delivered a trailing four-quarter earnings surprise of 3.1%, on average. The stock has lost 9.1% in the past three months. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Gibraltar's 2025 sales and EPS implies an increase of 9.3% and 15.8%, respectively, from a year ago. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report EMCOR Group, Inc. (EME) : Free Stock Analysis Report Gibraltar Industries, Inc. (ROCK) : Free Stock Analysis Report Sterling Infrastructure, Inc. (STRL) : Free Stock Analysis Report James Hardie Industries PLC. (JHX) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

Radio Flyer owner speaks at Annual Family Business Conference
Radio Flyer owner speaks at Annual Family Business Conference

Yahoo

time01-05-2025

  • Automotive
  • Yahoo

Radio Flyer owner speaks at Annual Family Business Conference

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — Little red wagons are an instrumental part of many people's childhoods, and the company's owner was in Sioux Falls to talk to the very people who used his products. Robert Pasin leads Radio Flyer, which was originally started by his grandfather in 1917. He spoke today at the Prairie Family Business Association's 33rd Annual Family Business Conference. SDSU student's Wicked performance gaining attention One of his main talking points was about how him and his team saved the company after it was almost lost. 'With that, an extended vehicle that someone might have to swerve into another lane. You have an emergency vehicle, like an ambulance or a fire truck, it makes it difficult for them to navigate that road also,' Matt Nelson said. Also starting Thursday, parking meters will be enforced Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And drivers can use the text-to-park option at downtown meters. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Honeycomb Acquires Grit to Accelerate Customer Value
Honeycomb Acquires Grit to Accelerate Customer Value

Martechvibe

time11-04-2025

  • Business
  • Martechvibe

Honeycomb Acquires Grit to Accelerate Customer Value

The acquisition will help customers instrument complex software systems for end-to-end observability, enhancing customer value. Honeycomb , the creators of observability, announced the acquisition of Grit, a powerful open-source query system and AI agent for customer value. The acquisition will help customers instrument complex software systems for end-to-end observability. The company also announced the appointment of two executives to its leadership team, with Julie Neumann joining as Chief Marketing Officer and Matt Nelson as Chief Revenue Officer. These announcements follow significant revenue growth and customer expansion in 2024, driven by the launch of Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline and Log Analytics as well as Frontend Observability. One substantial hurdle companies often face as they implement modern tooling is instrumenting existing code to emit telemetry data using OpenTelemetry. Grit developed an open source query system and AI agent that can programmatically search and modify codebases. With this acquisition, Honeycomb will be able to make it dramatically easier to adopt custom instrumentation. Grit's founder, Morgante Pell, is joining the Honeycomb engineering team to lead development of even more AI features that can combine Grit's codebase knowledge with Honeycomb's rich observability data to build better software. ALSO READ: Intuit Mailchimp Launches Generative AI Tool For Email Marketing 'Honeycomb is committed to helping engineering teams realise the full potential of AI, while delivering the system reliability and exceptional experiences their customers expect,' said Christine Yen, CEO and Co- Founder. 'Grit's technology solves major OpenTelemetry adoption hurdles, delivering the comprehensive observability our customers need to effectively manage their software systems and AI-powered applications.' Additionally, Honeycomb has made strategic executive hires to accelerate its go-to-market functions and expand into new markets. Julie Neumann, CMO: Neumann, a veteran storyteller who drove market expansion at Sinch, Testlio, and Snow Software, will spearhead efforts to bring the transformative value of Honeycomb to a global audience of developers and executives Matt Nelson, CRO: Nelson, with a history of driving substantial revenue growth at Forter, VMware, and Pivotal Software, will lead the global revenue organization, including sales, customer value, and strategic partnerships 'Julie and Matt's combined decades of experience in the enterprise, as well as their unwavering commitment to driving impactful growth at developer-oriented organizations, will be instrumental to Honeycomb's success,' said Yen. 'In a new era of software development, they will ensure more businesses are ready for tomorrow's engineering challenges, including taking advantage of AI while mitigating the inherent risks.' ALSO READ: WPP, Instacart Partner For Advertising Solutions, Measurement Tools The Martechvibe team works with a staff of in-house writers and industry experts. View More Blue Prism is a global software provider, offering ROM 2, an intelligent automation implementation methodology that empowers teams to scale their digital workflow. One of its use cases is sales and marketing solutions, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms. VISIT WEBSITE Pega is a combined business process management and robotic process automation (RPA) platform that comes with workforce analytics features. It offers a wide variety of tools such as Pega Email Bot to automate repetitive tasks with personalised customer replies at scale. VISIT WEBSITE EdgeVerve, a subsidiary of India-based IT company Infosys Technologies, offers RPA software for major enterprise companies. Its AssistEdge Robotic Process Automation provides machine learning and AI tools called Infosys Nia. Its AssistEdge RPA enables global marketing and distribution companies to automate 970+ manual tasks at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Clevertap is a comprehensive platform that allows global marketers to get unified customer data analytics and omnichannel engagement in one place. VISIT WEBSITE UseResponse is a fully customisable customer support and feedback software, helping companies to better understand the needs of their customers. It provides the capabilities of multichannel ticketing, live chat with messengers aggregator, chatbot, feedback community portal, and knowledge base. VISIT WEBSITE Survicate is a drag-and-drop, multichannel survey builder, helping brands effortlessly collect and analyse customer feedback. It offers 23+ one-click, native integrations, enabling advertisers and marketers to create follow-up campaigns based on real-time customer feedback. VISIT WEBSITE SAP Sales Cloud comes with end-to-end solutions and offers AI-fueled insights for understanding customers' preferences. It helps build customer profiles at scale. It also empowers users to automatically manage contact information, which streamlines clients' journeys. VISIT WEBSITE Freshsales by Freshworks is an AI-powered software that streamlines the sales cycle by automating mundane tasks and personalising customer engagement. It generates quality leads and nurtures relationships by understanding visitor intent in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Developed for midsize enterprises and large organisations, Creatio offers end-to-end CRM software solutions, allowing users to manage sales, marketing, and services all in one place. For marketing professionals, it provides Marketing Creatio, an omnichannel marketing platform to orchestrate customer journeys and accelerate lead-to-revenue. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce is a global technology provider, offering low code/no-code, AI-powered capabilities. Marketers and advertisers can harness its technologies for multiple use cases like B2B strategies, cross-channel personalisation, real-time analytics, and more. VISIT WEBSITE SAS offers embedded CDP capabilities, letting marketers unify customer data, understand digital activity and enable analytically driven, real-time activation. It comes with data activation facility that enables marketers to pull only the data they want, further reducing data migration costs. VISIT WEBSITE Blueshift is a scalable CDP platform that offers AI-driven capabilities for clubbing real-time events with related data from various sources. It streamlines these insights into unified customer profiles, enabling marketers to automatically personalise their targeting goals. VISIT WEBSITE Wotnot is a genAI-powered , no-code chatbot platform, helping the sales and marketing team to engage with visitors on their website via personalised conversations, catering to their lead-generation goals. It offers platform-based solutions, such as AI Studio, a GPT chatbot builder, and an analytics dashboard. VISIT WEBSITE Aisera is a generative AI platform provider that offers AI Copilot, AiseraGPT, and AiseraLLM for various domains. With Aisera, enterprises can accelerate the development of their LLMs or purchase ready-to-use generative AI solutions with pre-trained LLMs using customer data to reduce hallucinations. VISIT WEBSITE Deliotte offers Ncyte, an all-in-one analytics solution. Utilising patented algorithms, proprietary data models and predictive analytics, Ncyte delivers actionable insights for various marketing functions. With Nycte, data and marketing teams can pre-define events such as attributed campaign performance to evaluate their efforts with live notifications. VISIT WEBSITE CleverTap is a customer engagement and retention platform that offers the functionality to integrate app analytics and marketing. Powered by TesseractDB, a purpose-built database for engagement & retention, it combines the features of audience analytics, omnichannel engagement, and product A/B testing for marketing functions. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX), lets advertisers personalise their campaigns. Its flagship product, Oracle Moat, a comprehensive analytics and measurement platform, provides a suite of solutions across marketing and ad intelligence. Moat helps reach prospective customers, capture consumer attention, and measure the outcomes to unlock business potential. VISIT WEBSITE Meta Ads is a social media advertising platform leveraging the user base from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp to deliver personalised ads at scale. It offers Meta Business Suite and Meta Business Manager for managing and tracking ad performance. Utilising its AI-powered tools, advertisers can partially or fully automate with complete control over their ads. VISIT WEBSITE WebEngage is an end-to-end customer data platform, helping brands to strategise their customer engagement and retention functions. It supports third-party integration for use cases including customer segmentation, omnichannel engagement, and survey & feedback. VISIT WEBSITE ServiceNow features Robotic Process Automation Hub (RPA Hub), a scalable genAI-powered platform for orchestrating and managing a robotic workforce to execute various business processes. Its workflow automation enables tasks like lead management and campaign execution and supports integration with popular marketing tools to streamline processes. VISIT WEBSITE Tealium is a comprehesive customer data platform helping brands orchestrate and manage their data activation from a marketing standpoint. Its AudienceStream CDP functionality enables marketers to create custom campaigns via 1300+ integration options for several use cases. VISIT WEBSITE Qualaroo is a saas-based online survey creator offering Qualaroo Nudge, a proprietary technology for uploading custom properties for airtight targeting. It enables marketers to 'nudge' when user clicks on a page element, helping them to target visitors on their real-time activity. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk is a Danish-American company that offers software-as-a-service products with the capabilities of omnichannel integrations. Its omnichannel messaging platform enables sales and marketing teams to easily track and consolidate customer tickets from various sources, ensuring enhanced customer experiences. VISIT WEBSITE WebEngage is an all-in-one marketing platform that integrates omnichannel engagement with live analytics features. It offers AI/ML-driven product recommendations engine that enables marketers to boost conversion for all channels, including the web and mobile apps. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company offering omnichannel support capabilities for all customer-focused marketing functions. It provides no-code, easy-to-build API integrations to access real-time customer data from multiple sources — such as CRM, CDP and ecommerce platforms. VISIT WEBSITE SAP provides omnichannel marketing capabilities through its flagship product: SAP Emarsys. By accessing its purpose-built reports, teams can determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, segments, and channels in achieving sales goals. Its B2B account engagement features let brands deliver predictable and personalised marketing-led B2B insights at scale. VISIT WEBSITE MoEngage is a global AI-driven marketing platform that enables brands to orchestrate omnichannel campaigns from a single intuitive interface. Utilising MoEngage's User Path Analysis capabilities, marketing teams can target customers across 10+ channels, depending on their purchase behaviour. VISIT WEBSITE Intuit Mailchimp is an AI-powered omnichannel platform that offers email and marketing automation functions. With its customised pre-built audience segments, marketers can scale their campaigns based on individual contacts' demographic information and shopping behaviour. VISIT WEBSITE Hubspot is a cloud-based, scalable customer platform that offers various marketing automation solutions with omnichannel support capabilities. It enables marketers to create omnichannel campaigns to connect and interact with customers across multiple channels in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Bloomreach is an all-inclusive marketing automation platform that comes with omnichannel orchestration supports for various use cases, such as marketing campaign personalisation, and headless CMS commerce platform experience. VISIT WEBSITE Agillic specialises in offering global brands a comprehensive Omnichannel Marketing Automation Platform that enables them to create personalised marketing campaigns. Its multichannel marketing capabilities support multiple integrations, such as Playable and Sleeknote for lead generation, Zapier for automating routine processes, among others. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud features Adobe Campaign, enabling marketers to synchronise their customer data from various channels for omnichannel marketing. By leveraging its omnichannel integration with Adobe Journey Optimiser, brands can build multi-step journeys, campaigns, and personalised real-time moments that follow their customers across channels. VISIT WEBSITE ActiveCampaign is an intelligent multichannel marketing automation platform that enables marketers to seamlessly connect campaigns across the channels that matter most to them. It helps enterprises streamline personalised marketing, transactional emails, and one-to-one CRM interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE UiPath offers a comprehensive AI-powered robotic automation platform, enabling marketers to streamline recurring functions, such as lead automation and customer engagement. Utilising its capabilities, marketers can personalise and automate customer interactions, depending on their needs and preferences. VISIT WEBSITE SAP is a composable marketing automation technology provider, offering SAP Intelligent RPA solutions to automate repetitive, rules-based business processes, including marketing and sales. Using its tech stack, marketers can automatically extract product data from manufacturers' websites, update online inventory and import website and email sales. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft offers Power Automate, a low-code and AI-powered RPA software that helps marketers streamline tasks like lead management, email campaigns, social media management, data analysis, content publishing, and customer feedback. Leveraging its capabilities, businesses can automate repetitive tasks, such as lead capture and email marketing workflows. VISIT WEBSITE IBM offers AI-powered Robotic Process Automation capabilities for CRM and marketing functions. It enables users to automate workflows with integrated OCR and intelligent chatbots, distribute work across multiple bots without human interventions and manage emails via low-code authoring tools. VISIT WEBSITE Hyland offers an AI-powered comprehensive robotic automation software suite, enabling marketers' teams to automate their campaigns. Its Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology allows businesses to automate repetitive marketing functions, such as execution of targeted and personalised strategies in near real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Datamatics is an intelligent automation platform, offering TruBot RPA designer, a low-code bot design tool for marketing teams to create customised bots quickly. It provides 500 pre-built components, enabling low-code design and rapid deployment capabilities with drag-and-drop options. VISIT WEBSITE Automation Anywhere offers Automation Success Platform powered by Vertex AI, enabling enterprises to develop a cloud-based digital workforce at scale. Leveraging its bots, ML, and AI technologies, marketers can automate their marketing and sales processes. One of its popular offerings is Automation Co-Pilot, a genAI-powered assistant that empowers businesses to create and summarise content. VISIT WEBSITE Appian is a global technology provider, delivering end-to-end process automation with RPA, AI, IDP and API integrations. Utilising the readily available APIs of this low-code platform, teams can create a series of connected digital business applications including customer management and marketing. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by Zoho Corporation, Zoho Analytics enables marketers to track all critical metrics in a single platform to enhance marketing outcomes. The company offers 75 pre-built data visualisation reports and dashboards on marketing performance for collaborative analysis. With its AI-powered assistant, marketers can generate automated insights, predict future trends, and configure smart alerts. VISIT WEBSITE Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform, offering marketing analytics tools to global businesses. Its open-source analytical tools include Market Explorer and Traffic Analytics for understanding market trends and website traffic respectively. VISIT WEBSITE Nielsen is a global audience insights, data and analytics solution provider, helping marketers measure what people listen to and watch. It offers a comprehensive, AI-powered Nielsen Marketing Cloud platform with sub-products such as Audience Segments, Scarborough, and Advanced Audiences to understand audiences for different targeting initiatives. VISIT WEBSITE MoEngage is a full-stack marketing automation platform, offering consumer insights and analytics solutions for marketers to understand customer LTV. With MoEngage Analytics, they can measure user engagement, spot behavioural patterns, and act on retention to prevent app uninstalls. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft Clarity is a behavioural analysis tool that helps marketers understand user interaction with their website. It supports features like Session recordings, Heatmaps, and ML insights in real time. Processing more than a petabyte of data from over 100 million users per month, Clarity accommodates limitless traffic for various marketing measurements at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by AI-led insights, Merkle offers scalable marketing analytics and CX technology solutions, helping brands to optimise their campaigns. Some of its flagship solutions are Measurement & Media analytics, Consumer & Experience insights, and Product & Market intelligence. VISIT WEBSITE Hubspot offers marketing analytics and dashboard software, enabling businesses to make data-backed decisions for use cases, such as revenue generation, site analytics and detailed reporting. Leveraging the capabilities of its multi-touch revenue attribution model, marketers can monitor real-time website traffic via unique tracking codes. VISIT WEBSITE Google Analytics is an open-source analytics tool by Google, enabling marketing teams within organisations to better understand their customers via valuable insights. Consequently, businesses can use those insights to take action, such as website improvement and tailored audience list creation. VISIT WEBSITE Adverity is an integrated data analytics platform, enabling marketers to automate their customer's data integration and visualisation functions. It offers 600+ pre-built data connectors to popular marketing platforms, social media networks, SEO tools, and marketing automation solutions. The platform also provides pre-build dashboards to generate tailored reports. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target within its analytics tools solutions, enabling marketers to execute in-depth analysis of their customer data. Adobe Analytics allows the sales and marketing teams to mix, match, and analyse data from any digital point in the customer journey. VISIT WEBSITE Ahrefs features a suite of analytics tools under its Ahref Enterprise offering. It offers API and Looker Studio connectors, enabling marketing teams to elevate their SEO strategy with enterprise-grade and insights. Some of the criteria for its API endpoints include Backlinks, Organic & Paid Traffic, SERPs, Website health score and more. VISIT WEBSITE StackAdapt is a multi-channel programmatic advertising platform, enabling digital marketers to customise their strategy. It offers open and flexible DSP (Digital Signal Processing) capabilities for executing tailored ad campaigns. Furthermore, its ad previewer lets marketing teams preview video, display and native ads on desktop or mobile across 500+ publishers, covering 23 verticals. VISIT WEBSITE Rakuten is a global affiliate ad technology company, enabling advertisers to optimise their marketing strategies with data-driven insights. It offers AI-powered forecasting and benchmarking capabilities and dynamic multi-touch commissioning tools, allowing advertisers to customise their campaigns. It also supports first-party data collection integrations for both B2B and B2C marketers. VISIT WEBSITE Nielsen offers Nielsen Ad Intel, a cross-platform advertising intelligence platform with actionable insights to identify prospects, analyse brand strategies and learn from past advertising campaigns. It offers various advertising intelligence features such as ad spend monitoring, competitive benchmarking, global competitive insights and expert data harmonisation. VISIT WEBSITE Magnite is an independent sell-side advertising technology provider, enabling publishers to monetise their content across all screens and formats. It offers Magnite Streaming, a singular supply-side platform that merges technology from the Magnite CTV and SpotX platforms. Utilising this functionality, marketers can identify their potential audiences to restructure their targeting strategies. VISIT WEBSITE IBM offers a comprehensive suite of Watson Advertising to agencies and marketers. With Watson Advertising's AI-powered assistant, advertisers can customise their advertisements, based on real-time ad results. It also supports functionalities of cookieless advertising, ad fraud management and brand safety measurements. VISIT WEBSITE Google features a comprehensive list of AI-powered Ad tools under its Google Ads offering. Some of its popular tools include Keywords Planner, Ads Editor, Reach Planner, Ads Mobile App, Insights Finder, Ads API, and Recommendations Page. Additionally, it offers Google AdMob to help businesses plan their in-app revenue generation strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Criteo is an all-in-one connected commerce media platform, enabling marketers and agencies to scale their digital and physical assets. Leveraging the capabilities of its AI-powered technology, brands can develop strategies for intent-based product recommendations, multi-prolonged accessibility, contextual advertising, and more. VISIT WEBSITE Basis Tecnologies (formerly known as Centro), is a programmatic advertising platform, offering ad management tools for search, social and site direct via a single interface. Its flagship products are Basis Assistant and Basis Automate+. Basis Assistant is a Chrome extension, connecting 20+ platforms and tools, and Basis Automate+ is a digital advertising automation tool for simplifying campaign process. VISIT WEBSITE AppsFlyer is a mobile attribution company, helping mobile advertisers to identify their ad network. It offers a measurement suite, giving app marketers full visibility into their customer journeys while preserving their privacy. Utilising its AI-powered Creative Optimisation platform, marketers can formulate their creative strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Adtriba is a cross-channel digital marketing management platform based on data-driven attribution modelling. Its solutions include Adtriba Triangulation, enabling advertisers to witness the integration of diverse measurement methods, such as Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Incrementality Testing. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers connected advertising solutions with its natively integrated Adobe Advertising platform. Its consultancy-based reporting options come with AI-powered optimisation features, helping advertisers analyse their ad performance via 200+ measurement metrics. Utilising its connected TV (CTV) and search, social, and commerce tools, marketers can optimise their customer acquisition strategy. VISIT WEBSITE specialises in Conversational AI, generating autonomous conversations that appear human-like. These conversations form the foundation of brand engagement. Their AI-powered, no-code Dynamic Automation Platform manages around two billion conversations from a multitude of channels in numerous languages. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr offers a comprehensive suite of 250+ AI-intent bot templates for various industry verticals to accelerate bot development. Its specialised AI and compliant rule engine enables marketers to modify and automate their promotional campaigns for better engagement via suggestion-based personalised bots. VISIT WEBSITE Meta's new class of generative AI features and creative tools allow users to create and share custom stickers or update the visual style of their photos with a simple text prompt. They can also chat with 28 different AIs and get unique perspectives on topics like travel, games and food. VISIT WEBSITE is a UI-based platform that allows marketers to create a chatbot quickly and deploy it easily on multiple channels. Leveraging the capabilities of its conversational builder, enterprises can build the Dialogflow using dialogue messages. Some of its popular offerings include XO: Experience Optimisation and GALE(Beta). VISIT WEBSITE IBM watsonx Assistant is an interactive virtual agent that utilises natural language and AI, enabling users to set it up on their app and website. It offers fast and accurate responses to customers, enhancing their overall experience and satisfaction with its adaptive learning capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE Haptik helps enterprises manage their customer lifecycle with generative AI-powered conversational solutions to boost marketing and sales. It offers Contakt and Interakt to enhance overall CX, where Interakt enables marketers to send hyper-targeted and personalised campaigns to drive customers to take action on WhatsApp. VISIT WEBSITE Dialogflow is an all-in-one platform for developing chatbots, voice bots, and virtual agents using natural language understanding and Google AI. It helps marketing teams create conversational agents that can handle common customer requests and issues, such as FAQs, and order status at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Dialpad is a fully integrated unified conversation intelligence platform that utilises ongoing ML(Machine Learning) algorithms and does not require coding to configure a chatbot. It offers real-time insights and tips, helping marketing teams customise their approach for every customer. VISIT WEBSITE is a low code-no code, enterprise-grade generative AI platform offering readily available LLMs for CX transformations. Its omnichannel reporting and analytics suite for marketing enables organisations to streamline their customer journeys. VISIT WEBSITE is a global conversational AI technology provider optimised for operational efficiency at scale. It offers self-learning AI capabilities that emphasise Natural Language Understanding (NLU) along with intent suggestions. VISIT WEBSITE Avaamo is an all-in-one conversational AI platform for enterprises offering a suite of industry-specific skills developed to automate and resolve common use cases. It offers Outreach, which enables marketers to educate and engage with customers across existing touchpoints through proactive and personalised communication. VISIT WEBSITE Amazon Lex offers fully managed conversational AI interfaces with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications. It enables sales and marketing teams to automate user tasks in their applications like the CRM and across any digital channel. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk is an AI-powered customer feedback software provider, offering customer satisfaction (CSAT) software to businesses across multiple industries. Its marketplace offers 1600+ apps and integrations, enabling marketers to create a complete customer feedback system. VISIT WEBSITE UserVoice provides product feedback management software for SaaS businesses. Its UserVoice Validation tool delivers actionable user insights to inform roadmap strategy. From testing ideas to ensuring satisfaction with released features, it helps research and marketing teams gather quick user feedback throughout the entire product lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE Twilio provides integrated Mindful Feedback functionality within its Flex offering, enabling marketers to automatically take action based on real-time customer feedback. It automatically collects customer feedback after Flex interactions by capturing feedback over post-call voice IVR, outbound voice IVR, conversational SMS, Web SMS, email, and web surveys. VISIT WEBSITE Trustpilot offers ML and AI-powered feedback management tools, helping marketers build trust and loyalty through customer reviews. Its AI-driven Review Insights tool enables marketers to identify growth areas from negative feedback, whereas its Image Generator tool lets them enhance social media engagement. VISIT WEBSITE Survey Monkey is a global online survey and forms tech stack provider, offering AI-fueled market research solutions to businesses. Its enterprise feedback management program provides 250+ templates with the capabilities of customisation, allowing organisations to build tailored survey forms. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr is a unified customer experience platform (CXM), offering AI-powered feedback management capabilities with its flagship product: Sprinklr Surveys. It integrates solicited customer feedback with unified-CXM data, enabling brands to derive meaningful, actionable insights. Utilising its genAI-powered survey builder, marketers can create conversational surveys to streamline their NPS strategies. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce is a comprehensive customer-oriented technology provider offering a feedback management suite. Salesforce's survey responses help marketers create personalised surveys based on their existing customers' data. Some of the supported applications of its feedback management platform are genAI-powered survey form development and sentiment-insights-based survey collections. VISIT WEBSITE QuestionPro is an online feedback software provider, offering ready-made survey templates to businesses across 40+ countries. Leveraging the capabilities of its customer satisfaction templates, advertisers and marketers can create and gather tailored questions. VISIT WEBSITE Qualtrics is an all-in-one customer experience solution provider, offering website & app feedback tools for organisations to collect customer feedback efficiently. Its digital experience analytics capabilities combined with DXA integrations, bring together verbal and behavioural data for in-depth analysis of user feedback. VISIT WEBSITE HubSpot is a one-stop marketing platform, providing customer feedback software under its Service Hub offerings. Its pre-built APIs include net promote score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, allowing marketers to strengthen their customer loyalty strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Medallia is a comprehensive platform, enabling marketers to capture feedback from all customer touch points. Some of its popular feedback management software capabilities include Sense360 for analysing consumer spending, Medallia Video to automatically extract meaningful insights from customer's feedbacks and Agile Research for creating branded surveys in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Zeotap lets brands integrate, unify, segment and orchestrate customer data, fostering a cookieless future. It offers a 'Non-Customer Entity Data' feature that helps marketers to integrate both customer and non-customer entity data. VISIT WEBSITE Twilio provides, Twilio Segment, an AI-powered CDP, enabling marketers to streamline their personalised customer engagement journeys. It brings together clean, consented customer data for real-time insights with 450+ pre-built connectors. VISIT WEBSITE Syntasa provides data-ready CDP capabilities, equipping marketers with essential tools to prepare their customer data. It offers real-time sentiment analytics capabilities, helping enterprises derive behavioural insights from unified user profiles to foster hyper-personalised experiences. VISIT WEBSITE SAP is a company-wide customer data management platform, helping marketers improve engagement, conversion, and retention. It offers a genAI-powered data model, enabling enterprises to unify their B2B and B2C customers' profiles to reach their personalisation goals. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle is a global database management company, providing CDP solutions, under its flagship product: Oracle Unity. Its AI-powered models enable marketers to create hyper-personsalised campaigns with predictive insights by streamlining real-time customer data from heterogeneous sources. VISIT WEBSITE Growthloop is a composable CDP platform, allowing marketing and sales team to action their data at scale. It offers GrowthLoop Audience Builder, enabling marketers to initiate their lead generation functions. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers a real-time CDP, letting users create high-value audience segments for B2C and B2B use cases across their marketing funnel. It follows a cookieless marketing approach to automatically unify customer data across various online and offline channels in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE ActionIQ is a composable CDP platform that offers audience segmentation, acquisition marketing, and Customer 360 capabilities. It integrates analytical tools, enabling marketers to collect and analyse their first-party customer data at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Zoho CRM leverages automation and comprehensive analytics to empower any sales team, fostering stronger customer loyalty. Ideal for both small businesses and enterprises, this software enables enhanced productivity and tailored solutions through predictive intelligence. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk offers Zendesk Sell, an easy-to-deploy CRM platform that is simple to deploy and navigate, catering to businesses of any scale. Its mobile-friendly Sell app has the functionalities of geolocation, helping sales and marketing teams. Offering an all-in-one CRM platform, organisations can implement use cases like prospecting, engagement, lead generation and communication capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE SugarCRM is a global CRM software provider, helping marketing, sales, and service teams improve efficiency through automation, data, and intelligence in near real-time. It offers Sugar Market, an all-in-one marketing automation platform that helps marketers to automate their campaign with higher ROI. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce is a one-stop sales and support CRM software that regularly updates customer records, tracks emails and calls, and creates organised support processes for quicker customer responses. Its simple and scalable infrastructure is ideal for businesses of all sizes. VISIT WEBSITE Pipedrive stands out with its emphasis on automation, tailorability, and seamless integration. Purposefully built to enhance the efficiency and productivity of sales professionals, this CRM solution has an intuitive setup and robust capabilities. It facilitates lead generation, comprehensive sales analytics, and seamless business expansion. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle NetSuite CRM, a component of Oracle's business software suite, is for all midsize and booming businesses that want a comprehensive, integrated CRM solution with ERP capabilities. Using it, customers and partners can directly interact with the platform, freeing the additional work load for their sales team. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution brimming with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring and sentiment analysis. VISIT WEBSITE Less Annoying is a CRM software that utilises a straightforward search feature within its contact management system, making it easy to track contacts. It is ideal for small-sized businesses and offers a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface. VISIT WEBSITE Insightly offers CRM software solutions for enterprises looking to understand their audience data across various marketing functions. It integrates seamlessly with third-party apps, streamlining workflow automation, including bulk emailing and report generation. VISIT WEBSITE HubSpot's sleek dashboard with consolidated CRM tools simplify complex customer data, further transforming it into meaningful insights. Complementing typical CRM functionalities, HubSpot provides tailored options, including conversation intelligence and email monitoring. VISIT WEBSITE Apptivo delivers adaptable and web-based CRM solutions, enabling marketing and sales teams to streamline all customer service requirements across various devices and browsers. Despite its focused feature set, it encompasses over 65 interconnected applications alongside a robust sales pipeline management tool, ensuring efficient tracking of potential leads without any downtime. VISIT WEBSITE Sitecore offers composable cloud solutions with its flagship products, Sitecore Experience Platform(XP) and Sitecore Experience Manager (XM). They help marketers to overcome scalability challenges. Some of its features include intuitive visual editing, headless delivery, marketing automation, scalable personalisation, data and machine learning capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce Experience Cloud is a platform that helps enterprises link clients, partners, and employees to securely exchange information and documents. Built on its Customer 360 platform, Salesforce's DXP ensures seamless integration with any solution in the Salesforce ecosystem. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of platform-based marketing automation solutions for personalised B2B and B2C automation campaigns. Some of its featured products are Eloqua Marketing Automation, CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement, and Unity Customer Data Platform. VISIT WEBSITE Optimizely is a digital experience platform (DXP) provider that offers Optimizely One, an easy-to-use and fully integrated suite. It provides a single, unified workflow with thoughtfully embedded AI and machine-learning algorithms, accelerating work across the entire marketing lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE OpenText offers a cloud-native, scalable platform for enterprises to streamline their marketing functions. It provides fully composable content management, digital asset management, creative workflows, personalisation, targeting and customer data technologies in one place, ensuring a holistic approach to B2B, B2E and B2C experiences. VISIT WEBSITE Neptune DXP is a PaaS(Platform-as-a-Service) provider, helping marketing teams build custom apps based on modular, reusable application building blocks. The company offers flexible environments to businesses across different verticals, further providing personalised digital solutions at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Magnolia is a composable DXP that comes with no-code connector packs and low-code micro-frameworks for third-party integrations. It also offers an open-source version alongside its commercial plans enabling enterprises to build tailored use cases. VISIT WEBSITE Liferay DXP helps marketers deliver personalised and connected digital experiences across a broad range of channels, including customer portals, websites, intranets, mobile apps, and connected devices. It offers intuitive CMS, user analytics, and site management tools that businesses need to launch, test and optimise digital experiences for faster go-to-market. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by IBM Consulting, IBM iX offers a composable DXP, providing a comprehensive solution to make enterprises' systems future-ready. Utilising its data-driven insights and intelligent workflows, marketers can design and deliver human-centred experiences across the customer lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE HCL Digital Experience (DX), forms part of a wider HCL Customer Experience (CX) product portfolio, offering core capabilities such as content management, DAM, CDP called Signals, and low-code application development. It provides services in government, life sciences, insurance, financial services, and other verticals. VISIT WEBSITE Contentstack is a headless CMS and Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solution provider that helps marketers gain a competitive edge. It recently launched into Google Cloud Marketplace, and is also available on Microsoft Azure and AWS. It seamlessly enables mid-market brands to adopt its omnichannel campaign engine to drive higher conversions and sales. VISIT WEBSITE Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud provides businesses an edge with its modular capabilities: Content Management System (CMS), Discovery features for search and merchandising optimisation, and Engagement tools such as Customer Data Platforms (CDP) for personalisation and analytics. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of services specifically designed to address the day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experience at scale. Its platform helps manage different digital content and assets to improve customer satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage. VISIT WEBSITE Acquia offers DXP solutions, comprising of two main elements: Acquia Drupal Cloud and Acquia Marketing Cloud. It can be accessed in both platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) with additional components such as Site Factory for multisite management, digital asset management (DAM), CDP, personalisation, and Campaign Studio. VISIT WEBSITE

This man rates dogs for a living. He has millions of loyal followers.
This man rates dogs for a living. He has millions of loyal followers.

Washington Post

time20-03-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Washington Post

This man rates dogs for a living. He has millions of loyal followers.

It started as a series of jokes. Matt Nelson began posting one-liners on X, formerly Twitter, in 2015 to test his comedic chops. 'I noticed that all of my jokes that had to do with dogs just did way better than my other jokes,' said Nelson, then a college freshman at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina. That sparked an idea. 'If the entire internet loves dogs, and so do I, and I have a knack for writing humorously about them, then I should start a new account,' said Nelson, who grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. He decided to post a poll on his personal X account, asking his small following if he should create a dog-rating account. At the time, X had a 140-character limit on posts, so Nelson thought numerical ratings were a way to keep things concise. The poll results were unanimous, and WeRateDogs was born. He added the tagline: 'Your only source for professional dog ratings.' The first post, on Nov. 15, 2015, was of a friend's dog. 'Here we have a Japanese Irish Setter. Lost eye in Vietnam (?). Big fan of relaxing on stair. 8/10 would pet,' Nelson wrote in an X post, along with a photo of the dog. 'After that first post, we had 100 messages from people wanting their own dog rated,' Nelson said. 'It was a nonstop torrent of potential content.' Within one week of the first post, WeRateDogs had 100,000 followers on X. Nelson quickly realized that his comedic experiment had a lot of potential. But he had no idea that nearly a decade later, WeRateDogs would continue to have a huge, fiercely loyal following on social media, including 9 million followers on X, 4.4 million on Instagram, 2.8 million on TikTok and 1.2 million on Facebook. His videos regularly get millions of views, with some of them clocking in at tens of millions, and thousands of enthusiastic comments. It's also a profitable business with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arm. When he first started, Nelson decided to go all-in to figure out if he could make it big. He made the tough choice to drop out of college — where he was studying professional golf management — in 2017 to dedicate all his time to WeRateDogs. 'Once I realized that I had this passion for it and I was having so much fun, nothing I was doing in school was assisting me with that,' said Nelson, who now lives in Los Angeles. Although his account is lighthearted and funny, Nelson said, running a dog-rating business is no joke. Initially, he managed everything himself for several months, sifting through thousands of daily dog submissions he was getting through direct messages from fans. He'd select which ones to post and think up a witty caption and rating for each pup. 'In the beginning, it was staggering,' Nelson said. 'It was probably close to 5,000 to 6,000 submissions a day.' Choosing the dogs to feature, he said, felt like an impossible task. So many of them beckoned to be rated. Nelson prioritized the funniest or highest-quality photos. 'Every dog is the best and every dog is the cutest,' Nelson said. His profile photo hasn't changed since he started the account. It's of a dog named Pippin with striking blue eyes and an intense expression, which he picked because he wanted the account to have a playfully absurd feel. 'It felt very formal, and that was contrasted with the ridiculous posts I was making,' Nelson said. Nelson initially found the photo of Pippin online, but as the account grew, Pippin's owners eventually got in touch with him and they became friendly. At first, all dogs were rated fairly high (aside from non-canine animals, which were given low ratings), but they were never rated above 9/10. Then one day, Nelson decided to give one dog a 10/10 rating, and people went wild. Another day, he gave a dog 11/10. 'That was a eureka moment,' Nelson said. He adjusted his rating scale so the lowest was 10/10 and the highest was 15/10. Recently, the lowest score has been 12/10. Nelson said his rating process is arbitrary, unless the pup is a true 'hero dog' worthy of the coveted 15/10 rating. His generous ratings have become a key part of the WeRateDogs identity. 'When we hit a million followers, I was like, 'People are paying attention to this in a way that I never would have imagined,'' Nelson said. 'I didn't go into it thinking anything could be accomplished besides a few laughs.' As the account exploded in popularity, it became too much for Nelson to manage on his own. He brought on someone to help him sort through submissions, though he remained the sole writer for the first five years. He became known for his deadpan wisecracks. In a 2016 X post, WeRateDogs featured a dog named Duke, sitting in a fridge. 'This is Duke. He sneaks into the fridge sometimes. It's his safe place. 11/10 would give little jacket if necessary,' Nelson wrote. Nelson said he focuses on dogs because he doesn't have a strong opinion about cats, and because he has never owned a cat. 'I just know that I wouldn't be able to make a WeRateCats,' he said. 'I wouldn't do it justice.' As the account started to get even more popular, dog owners began sharing more information about their pups along with their submissions, including poignant backstories. Although most of the posts remained silly, a few became more serious. 'This is Jacob. In June of 2016, he comforted those affected by the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Four months ago he flew to Vegas to help families of 59 people grieve. Today, he is in Parkland, Florida hugging students who lost classmates yesterday. He is our third 15/10,' WeRateDogs posted in 2018. In addition to funny dog photos, followers were often sending WeRateDogs fundraising pages for pups in need, usually to cover unexpected medical bills. In 2017, Nelson started featuring a fundraiser every Friday, which quickly grew to three every Friday to keep up with demand. The posts, which feature GoFundMe accounts, raised close to $3 million in four years, Nelson said. 'We just knew there was something more there,' he said. 'All of this sent us in the direction of a foundation.' In 2021, Nelson and his team launched a nonprofit group called the 15/10 Foundation with a mission to sponsor dogs with medical needs and improve their chances of adoption. 'We have 45 rescue partners across the U.S., and we've sponsored almost 900 dogs. Their average medical cost is just under $5,000,' Nelson said. 'Once it felt like people were invested in the account and it meant a lot to them, we could turn it into a real force for good.' Nelson's own dog, Doug, whom he called WeRateDogs' chief executive, died in 2023. Nelson and his girlfriend regularly foster dogs, and said they hope to adopt another one soon. 'It's like an interview process for our next CEO,' Nelson said. WeRateDogs now has a team of about 50 people who help run the nonprofit group and the business — which makes money mostly through brand partnerships and by selling merchandise and calendars. Nelson said 15 percent of net proceeds from merchandise sales go to the foundation. Popular items include stickers and T-shirts that say 'tell your dog i said hi.' 'It's really wonderful to be at the helm of this community,' Nelson said. 'It's just such a kind, empathetic, optimistic community, and I really take a lot of pride in protecting and nurturing that.' Beyond its signature humorous dog ratings, WeRateDogs publishes a 'Top 5 Dogs of the Week,' video, and it recently launched a weekly podcast called 'The Dogs Were Good (again).' Since the dogs continue to be good, and the public seems to have an insatiable desire to know the dogs' official ratings, Nelson does not have plans to slow down. 'There are just so many dogs to talk about, and I could talk about them forever,' Nelson said. While WeRateDogs has grown into something Nelson never thought possible, he said his primary goal has never changed: to bring people joy. 'It's all rooted in that,' Nelson said.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store