The modern web has started with just one website almost 30 years ago. And creating a website, whatever its type, is still a good idea if you want to share some information or offer goods and services. Having a website makes you accessible to everyone, as people don't need to take extra steps like signing up with a particular social network or downloading one more mobile app. That's why, though our technologies and gadgets have evolved drastically by this time, websites are cornerstones the contemporary Internet is based on. No one will tell you the exact number: some sources say it's about 1.3 bln, others claim there are even more -- the figure will always be floating due to the scoring methods and fact that every second some website may be "born" or disappear.

How do eCommerce enterprises earn loyalty from their users? And, notably, one of the most popular means to delight eCommerce users is personalization. However, for eCommerce enterprises, personalization has been largely limited to their websites. Moreover, website personalization itself is mostly segment-based and not implemented at a 1:1 scale. To achieve remarkable customer loyalty and engagement rates, it is imperative for eCommerce brands to provide a highly personalized experience to users across all touchpoints.

Voice assistants are the next big thing. Some say they're the next mobile, though I don't even know if that's accurate or an understatement. All the major platform companies have one, and startups building them appear ever faster, making it hard to even keep track of everything. The point is, they are going to be everywhere and are going to dominate the way we interact with our computers. Yet I hear many questioning if these assistants are even viable from a business perspective.

Demandbase has baked artificial intelligence (AI) technology into its website personalization product in a move designed to help B2B marketers serve up relevant content and web pages for new and returning site visitors. The B2B account-based marketing (ABM) platform provider today released Site Optimization, a tool which leverages the machine learning and data science capabilities it acquired from Spiderbook in May 2016. Those capabilities can scale to analyze billions of web pages and target accounts, according to Demandbase officials. "This marks the next step of putting artificial capabilities into our website personalization product, which we've had out on the market for a few years," Demandbase Chief Marketing Officer Peter Isaacson told CMSWire in an interview. "The idea behind it is to customize the website experience for any visitor coming to your site including the folks coming to your site for the first time that don't have a cookie on them. We're customizing that experience based on the company they're from, the industry they're in, the size of the company, location."