Interviews, insight & analysis on digital media & marketing

New Business Bulletin: Pixel Artworks, Squarespace, Planet and many more

Opening in central London on Monday, 25th July 2022, immersive experience company Pixel Artworks has designed and created the immersive mindfulness experience ‘Room to Breathe’. Located in Outernet London, a brand-new immersive culture, media and music district at Tottenham Court Road, the soothing sensory experience is based on the science of ‘box-breathing’. It aims to help anxious commuters and busy Londoners unwind and catch their breath throughout the day. The unique immersive mindfulness experience will be showing at 11am-12pm, 2-3pm and 7-8pm daily and will be open to the public from Monday 25th July onwards. The experience will take place in Outernet London’s NOW Trending building, opposite exit 4 from Tottenham Court Road station. There’s no need to reserve a space or pay to experience the sessions which are open to all.  

Squarespace, the all-in-one website building and ecommerce platform, has announced the launch of Fluid Engine, a next-generation website design system that reimagines drag-and-drop technology for a truly customizable, fast, and easy website design experience for desktop and mobile. With Fluid Engine, customers unlock what we call Unbreakable Creativity – the ability to push creative boundaries in web design with confidence. The reimagined design system provides users the maximum freedom to easily play, experiment, and stretch creative limits through an unrestricted canvas, but the canvas is also guided by an advanced smart grid to ensure quality results. The system provides just enough design guidance to make a website look great without limiting creativity. With a highly intuitive, fluid, and agile website editing experience, anyone—whether beginner or pro—can achieve the unique and professional design results that allow them to stand out and succeed online. It is powerful enough to be used by the most creative professionals in web design, while also easy-to-use for beginners.

Planet, a global technology company providing integrated software and payment services, is extending its footprint in the hospitality industry with the acquisition of Avantio, the all-in-one vacation rental management software and services company. For property managers, Avantio helps them to save time and increase profitability. Avantio’s technology automates time consuming tasks for property managers and boosts the guest experience. Avantio’s customers will benefit from new services and capabilities that deliver a unique experience, perfectly crafted for property managers in the vacation rental market. For Avantio, this partnership sees it secure an investment partner that will help develop technology, software and payment services that achieve a new, unique customer experience.

InfoSum, the data collaboration platform, has announced the launch of Platform Sigma, the next evolution in first-party data collaboration and privacy protection. These enhancements, the most significant update in InfoSum’s history, provide organizations with the safest, most secure, and most interoperable infrastructure to build and manage their own data clean rooms. Platform Sigma is the next-generation data collaboration platform, enabling full-scale transformation, application, and analysis of first-party data without sharing or movement. Platform Sigma provides a featherweight software layer that can sit on top of any existing technology stack to power private and secure collaboration between multiple first-party datasets. These enhancements solve the advertising ecosystem’s interoperability challenges and allow for faster and more seamless marketing use cases including deep consumer insights, cross-channel activation, and measurement, with end-to-end protection and security. 

Visitors to House of Hackney’s new flagship store in East London will now be able to benefit from a pioneering phygital experience, thanks to Intelligent Self Service experts, 4 Roads. Situated in “The Playroom”, the specially created moodboard from 4 Roads will enable customers of the British luxury interiors & lifestyle brand to visualise dream concepts on a true-to-life scale, before making a purchase – all while being able to touch and layer fabric, paint and wallpaper samples in real life. Customers and House of Hackney consultants will be able to use the 4 Roads innovation to create “product shortlists”, either from home or in-store, which can then be projected onto The Playroom walls, in order to aid decision making.

Creative media agency, What Media, has expanded its business into its own production space at Department Bonded Warehouse, giving it a dedicated studio to create content for its clients. The agency has had resident desk spaces at the Manchester city centre workspace since 2020 and is now taking advantage of one of the six newly acquired production studios at the site. In that time, the business has grown to a team of 12 and worked on major campaigns with household name clients.

Partnership marketing tech provider Affise has launched a new mobile measurement platform (MMP) known as Affise Attribution. Affise Attribution becomes the latest part of the expanding Affise ecosystem of services, which together provide a seamless, fully integrated view of performance marketing data. The Affise Attribution platform includes access to Facebook mobile attribution data, and provides more accurate attribution information than current existing services. It also boasts a transparent pricing model, which supports up to 10,000 monthly active users (MAUs) at no charge. In its initial version, Affise Attribution supports the Android software development kit (SDK), as well as the Unity SDK and WebView SDK plus web-to-app, deeplinks, Facebook attribution, uninstall/reinstall tracking, Android package (APK) tracking, pre-installed tracking, and more.

First-party data agency Planning-inc has unveiled Unilyze, its new Customer Data Platform (CDP) solution to enable businesses to fully leverage their customer data and achieve sustainable growth. The advanced solution from Planning-inc, which builds on 20 years’ expertise in developing single customer view and marketing science solutions for brands such as Argos, Halfords and Prezzo, will power hyper-personalised marketing and insight-fuelled decision-making by enabling brands to unify on- and offline behavioural and transactional data and operationalising it in real-time.

In partnership with music platform and radio station NTS, Diesel introduces TRACKS, a multi-pronged experience rooted in the connectivity of music and nightlife. TRACKS brings together a mix of progressive musical talent from around the globe to promote the universal language of club culture, connection and party. With a worldwide focus, the partnership will explore a mix series, live club nights, radio mixes, talent profiles, roundtable discussions with key music collectives and a climactic party to round it off. TRACKS will roll out in three phases. Kicking off on July 25th, TRACKS launches with a series of radio mixes and Spotify playlists designed to showcase the music and nightlife culture specific to different cities around the globe.

Immediate Media Co, the special interest content and platform company, has launched The Recommended, offering product recommendations and buyers advice from experts to help users shop smarter online. The Recommended offers authoritative buyers’ guides currently under four main categories: household, cosmetics, fitness and pet-care, with experts offering advice on what to look for and what to avoid when buying products online.

Digital Poverty Alliance (DPA), a charitable initiative representing a broad coalition of third, public and private sector partners working to end digital poverty, has announced their partnership with Sincere Education and Cultural Development (SECD), to help provide access to technology for Ukrainian refugee families. Through the partnership, the DPA have provided 100 laptops and, thanks to Vodafone’s charities.connected scheme,  pre-paid SIM cards to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in London. The Centre hosts the only Ukrainian school in the UK, St Mary’s Ukrainian School, and is the only one that provides teaching in the Ukrainian language. The scheme seeks to support those families who are fleeing the war by allowing them access to online services, including education. While the DPA’s focus is on advocating for action to end digital poverty in the UK, they also take forward a number of projects to ensure that the communities who need help the most receive it now. The recently published Digital Poverty Evidence Review found that digital exclusion exacerbates existing inequalities and hampers education.

PFS, a premier eCommerce order fulfilment provider and business unit of PFSweb, Inc., has announced a partnership with Vimaan, a technology provider delivering computer vision-enabled solutions for warehouse inventory tracking, control, and management. Initially, PFS is integrating Vimaan’s StorTRACK AIR, the first-of-its-kind self-flying warehouse drones to automate inventory tracking activities within one of PFS’s Memphis-based fulfilment operations that stores and picks, packs, and ships inventory for premier brands. Scanning inventory from the ground to the ceiling, the robots capture up to 1,500 locations per hour and deliver highly accurate inventory status details to the PFS Warehouse Management System (WMS). The implementation of this solution will improve the accuracy and traceability of client product inventory across PFS’ fulfilment centres.