The MarTech Minute: HubSpot’s newest solutions, Bloomreach and Salesforce launch search connector, DialPad reveals new AI for Uberconference and more

MarTech Minute briefs always appear first in our daily newsletter throughout the week. Click here to subscribe. The following is our compilation of the past week’s briefs from those newsletters.

HubSpot announces new growth platform features for sales and marketing and new marketplace. HubSpot’s expanded features include a machine learning tool to remove duplicate contacts, expanded functionality in Sales Hub Professional, and improvements to HubSpot Conversations. The upgrades, which were announced at this year’s INBOUND conference in Boston, were all prioritized based on direct feedback from HubSpot’s customers. “Businesses today are using more apps than ever to get their work done. According to the 2019 Blissfully SaaS Trends Report, every employee is using 8 apps and companies over 250 employees are using over 100 apps,” said Ari Plaut, senior product marketing manager, HubSpot. “To remove every ounce of friction from their customer experience, they need a central platform that makes it easy to create connections between tools, the new App Marketplace makes it easy to find, install, and manage app integrations through HubSpot. The new App Marketplace also makes the experience of building apps for developers a lot easier as well.”

Salesforce and Bloomreach launch new connector. Bloomreach today announced it has launched a B2B Search & Merchandising Connector for Salesforce Commerce Cloud on the Salesforce AppExchange. The new connector will help businesses connect with their customers, partners and employees in different ways. The connector allows users of Commerce Cloud to integrate Bloomreach’s site search and merchandising tools in users’ B2B commerce environment, providing their users with even more relevant search results and allowing their merchandisers to focus on strategic tasks while smart algorithms take over the grunt work.

HighWire announces partnership with SendGrid. The scholarly tech publisher is partnering with email deliverability vendor SendGrid and unified global ad server AdButler in hopes of allowing publishers to gain more insights from their customers. AdButler will allow publishers to show ads in their email alerts. “We can easily see how many people have signed up and opened emails at a global level, but also journal by journal,” said Matt Zimmerman, online platform director at Springer Publishing Company. “If that number is lower than expected, we know that very quickly and can start to think of better ways to get engage our readers. In the past, we didn’t have an easy way to track any of this. By using the depth of data now available, we can better understand our readers’ behaviors, what they will be interested in, and make informed changes.”

Drift acquires Giant Otter to launch Drift Automation. Conversational marketing platform Drift has acquired Giant Otter and announced the launch of Drift Automation. Giant Otter, previously led by CEO Jeff Orkin, Ph.D., has joined the Drift team and launched the Drift AI Lab. “At Drift, we think a lot about customer experience. And we realized that we needed to disrupt ourselves at Drift in order to really deliver on it,” said Drift CEO, David Cancel. “Giant Otter’s machine learning and AI technology helped us do just that, and build on the mission we created four years ago — to transform the way businesses buy from businesses.” Drift Automation is the first product from the AI Lab and has been designed to develop a better contextual understanding of what an engaged user needs

Kabbage to acquire B2B CDP assets from Radius Intelligence. The small business vendor will acquire assets of the small business data platform. The acquisition will allow Kabbage to understand and serve their small-business customers with the addition of the 20 million U.S. small business insights to its platform. “Data has always been our competitive advantage, and Radius strengthens it by adding millions of new and verified small business insights to our platform,” said Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein. “These new technology and data-analysis capabilities further differentiate us from other SMB-focused FinTech companies as we dramatically expand our product set and service platform to address the unique cash flow needs of small businesses.”

Skype’s messaging features upgraded. Video calling and chat app Skype is getting a few new upgrades to its messaging feature sets. Namely, support for Message Drafts will be added, allowing users to start a message and return to it at a later time. Image and video previews can also be neatly organized in the Skype interface and shared with groups working on projects together.

Dialpad launches AI features for UberConference. Cloud-native communications platform Dialpad has rolled out new features to its UberConference solution that includes HD video conference, automated transcripts, notes and action items. Voice Intelligence uses speech recognition and natural language processing to analyze conversations, then provides detailed meeting notes to attendees following the meeting.