Swag has a long and patchy history in the world of business. For every hip pair of plaid socks, there are five t-shirts you may never wear, an itchy scarf, a notepad your kids might use, and an ugly mug; and most of all, likely thousands of dollars and lots of time invested to make those presents a reality. Now, a startup that has built a service to rethink the concept behind corporate gifts and make them more effective is today announcing a round of funding to continue expanding its business -- and one sign that it may be on to something is its progress so far. Alyce, a Boston startup that has built an AI platform that plugs into various other apps that you might use to interact and track your relationships with others in your working life -- sales prospects, business partners, colleagues -- and then uses the information to personalise gift recommendations for those people, has raised $30 million, a Series B that it will be using to continue building out its platform, signing up more users, and hiring more people for its team. This round is being led by General Catalyst, with Boston Seed Capital, Golden Ventures, Manifest, Morningside and Victress Captial -- all previous backers -- also participating.

Back in 2006, Phil Fernandez, Jon Miller, and David Morandi founded Marketo. At the time, they only had a PowerPoint. But then again, they also had a compelling vision to create a new category known as marketing automation. Within a few years, Marketo would become one of the fastest software companies in the world, as the market-product fit was near perfect. By 2013, the company went public and then a few years later, it would go private. Then as of 2018, Marketo agreed to sell to Adobe for $4.75 billion.

Back in 2006, Phil Fernandez, Jon Miller, and David Morandi founded Marketo. At the time, they only had a PowerPoint. But then again, they also had a compelling vision to create a new category known as marketing automation. Within a few years, Marketo would become one of the fastest software companies in the world, as the market-product fit was near perfect. By 2013, the company went public and then a few years later, it would go private. Then as of 2018, Marketo agreed to sell to Adobe for $4.75 billion.

We have come to an advanced leg in our internet science journey. We can no longer think of the internet as a glorified encyclopedia. Enter the virtual assistant with its interpersonal secretary skills. Now, we have a machine that functions with human intent. In light of this, our search engine optimization (SEO) must reflect far more than keywords.

"Marketo is on a mission to build the world's broadest and most powerful marketing engagement platform. With Google Cloud, our customers can leverage big data on a world-class cloud platform and deliver faster campaign performance to engage with billions of individuals in the moment, while providing the security that customers demand," said Steve Lucas, CEO, Marketo. "Together we are envisioning solutions that will quickly put greater insights in the hands of the marketer, saving them time and energy." The Marketo Engagement Platform currently manages nearly half a trillion interactions every year. To make these interactions smarter, Marketo is using Google Cloud machine learning to empower marketers to tap into even more of their own data, and interpret insights without the need of data scientist.

That was the promise made by Steve Lucas, well into his second year as Marketo CEO, and putting the emphasis -- as you might expect from his track record with SAP and Salesforce -- on product. There was no shortage of product announcements at Marketing Nation 2018, Marketo's annual summit, although they were perhaps overshadowed by acquisition and partnership news: The acquisition, in particular, of marketing performance platform Bizible, announced yesterday; the acquisition of Marketo integration specialists Tibco; the announcement of a strategic partnership with SAP, delivering native integration of Marketo into SAP CRM and Hybris Cloud for Customer; and perhaps dominating the day, the news that Marketo will run exclusively on the Google Cloud platform, with the ability to leverage the Tensor Flow AI software library. That's quite a lot to digest, and I haven't even mentioned the new UX experience, Marketo Sky, or the long-awaited re-emergence of year-old acquisition ToutApp as Marketo Sales Engage. But first the overview from Steve Lucas, who -- with all his zany digressions -- is one of the more entertaining keynote speakers among tech CEOs. One of Lucas's most striking remarks referred to the transition from CRM to "something entirely new."

San Francisco: Marketo, Inc., the provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, today announced it is working with Google Cloud, as part of the multiyear alliance announced last year, to create new products to empower marketers by using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Leveraging Google Cloud's machine learning technology, Marketo is working with Google's experts to create new offerings that improve the speed, scale, and effectiveness of campaigns by enabling marketers to better personalize and segment their audiences. The collaboration will be discussed on stage at Marketing Nation Summit, Marketo's annual conference. "Marketo is on a mission to build the world's broadest and most powerful marketing engagement platform. With Google Cloud, our customers can leverage big data on a world-class cloud platform and deliver faster campaign performance to engage with billions of individuals in the moment, while providing the security that customers demand," said Steve Lucas, chief executive officer, Marketo.

Not long ago, reaching audiences through technologies like email was considered breakthrough. Fast forward to today, a hyper-accelerated existence in which the average human checks their smartphone over 150 times daily. This phone-fiddling translates into the average enterprise dealing with somewhere between 200 and 300 million digital signals per day, yet most can barely handle about 2 percent of that data. This implies companies attempt to make sense of around 4 million signals every single day -- which is still far too many to analyze, interpret, and respond to quickly. As for the 98 percent of the signals organizations can't handle, massive amounts of opportunity and insight are lost.

As the leaves in this New England city change colors and meet their demise, discussions of artificial intelligence and its practical application in marketing remain very much alive. Scott Brinker's MarTech Conference, held this week at Boston's Hynes Convention Center, was certainly no exception as thought leaders, marketing practitioners and vendors were among the 1,500 attendees who had artificial intelligence (AI) on the mind. Brinker himself joked during his Tuesday keynote that he's "legally required to talk about artificial intelligence at a marketing conference." Vendors at MarTech stressed the value of content analysis, automation and understanding customer intent better to deliver superior digital customer experiences. Brinker, conference founder, creator of the Chief Martech blog and vice president of platform ecosystem for inbound marketing provider HubSpot, told attendees during his keynote that AI reinforces the need for better quality data management.

SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 3, 2017 -- Marketo, Inc., the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, has announced Marketo ContentAI, an artificial intelligence-powered solution that engages each customer with the most relevant content across channels. In addition, the solution uniquely predicts the content most likely to convert each audience, helping marketers develop data-driven content marketing plans. Today's announcement reinforces Marketo's commitment to providing marketers with leading-edge AI solutions that empower them to win in the Engagement Economy. ContentAI is the only solution that makes content personalization scalable for marketers by auto-discovering and cataloging website assets and using AI to determine the best content to display to each audience. Marketers personalize their websites, mobile experiences, and email with ease through drag-and-drop content placement, while maintaining control over what is delivered through each channel.