EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY
Outschool | July 26, 2022
Promoted, which is the only company to unify search, feed, ads, and promotions for top marketplaces, announced today that Outschool has selected Promoted to optimize the performance and profitability of its education marketplace.
Outschool wanted to better match its classes with learners to increase search conversion rates, total GMV (gross merchandise value), and profitability. Outschool chose Promoted after weighing the costs and risks of building an order-of-magnitude greater infrastructure investment versus working with the experienced Promoted team to get a proven, real-time streaming data service with ML in place. Within a quarter, Promoted optimized Outschool search to increase conversion by about +11%, with more improvements planned for H2 2022.
“Promoted is able to measure and report on data in real-time on search for us and use machine learning to better match teachers and students so we can very effectively increase conversion rates and make our customers and users happy. “The founders have deep experience in search optimization as ad engineers from Facebook, Pinterest and Google, and we have found the technology extends and compounds our existing engineering investments in search and discovery to directly increase profitability at a reasonable cost.”
Kejia Zhu, Lead Product Manager, from Outschool
Promoted and Marketplaces
Right now, most large marketplaces have separate teams for ads, merchandising, search, and recommendations. They all work in separate departments and information is siloed. Even with expensive tech savvy engineers, these businesses do not have a unified data infrastructure that is measuring performance of everything in search feed, merchandising, and ads across the marketplace.
When ads, listings, promotions, and search aren’t optimized together, conversions are low, revenues decrease, and it becomes a death spiral as more ads and promotions are shown to compensate, further driving away users. Promoted is the only provider that offers a complete and comprehensive solution to fix this problem for e-commerce apps and marketplaces.
Promoted’s secret sauce is its ability to provide an entire measurement solution with a data service that measures and optimizes user engagement in real-time. Other ad tech or search vendors are measuring pieces with siloed data and/or only measuring ads, not giving marketplaces the complete picture.
How it Works
First, Promoted measures everything in its client’s app or marketplace, then they aggregate and join the data in real-time with reporting. Next, using AI-based data optimization, Promoted creates a complete picture of the data so they can predict conversion and clicks for the client’s search and feed.
Once Promoted has this complete picture of performance on a marketplace, it creates a “unified currency” for optimizing trade-offs between the optimal user experience in search and feed, seller experience using ads and promotions, and marketplace profitability versus growth.
“We are very excited to be working with Outschool and to so quickly increase conversions for its business,” said Andrew Yates, Co-Founder and CEO of Promoted. “Promoted gives top marketplaces and e-commerce companies one complete picture of how search, feed, ads and promotions are performing by measuring in real-time and then optimizing them using machine learning to increase conversions. By unifying this information, the entire marketplace works properly, and CFOs and COOs can set achievable goals for revenue and profitability.”
About Outschool
Outschool offers live online education experiences that connect real-life teachers with learners in small-group settings to explore everything from Minecraft, Pokemon and Cooking to Chemistry, Algebra and Literature. With over 100,000 online classes offered by teachers to learners around the globe, Outschool helps supplement what is often missing from a more traditional education. Outschool’s mission is to inspire kids to love learning by making education fun, social and self-directed. Classes on Outschool range from one-time enrichment lessons to semester-long core courses and weekly social clubs. Classes are offered across all subjects, and learners range from age 3 to 18.
About Promoted
Promoted is the only company to unify search, feed, ads, and promotions for top marketplaces like Outschool, Hipcamp, Teachers Pay Teachers, Snackpass, and other e-commerce unicorns. Promoted works by measuring everything in the marketplace using its real-time streaming data infrastructure. Then, Promoted maximizes conversions in search and feed through machine learning. Backed by Y Combinator, the company was founded by former ad engineers from Pinterest, Facebook, and Google.
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EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY
TalentSprint | July 25, 2022
TalentSprint, a global edtech company and a market leader in transformational deeptech programs, today announced a multi-year and multi-program partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) School of Computer Science (SCS), Executive & Professional Education – World’s #1 Computer Science School. The Advanced Certificate Program in DevOps, first to be launched under this partnership, aims at fulfilling a growing need for new-age DevOps professionals in the APAC region.
Most impacted by digital transformation, industries like BFSI, IT, Healthcare, Retail, Media and Entertainment are creating enormous opportunities for DevOps specialists globally. These market dynamics positions CMU’s well-researched Advanced Certificate Program in DevOps as a significant addition in the upskilling journey of the aspirants.
“This partnership has further strengthened our presence in the United States. CMU’s School of Computer Science is iconic and this association is a validation of our success in path-breaking programs with leading institutes and global tech organizations in India and the US. Our first program with CMU aims at creating world-class DevOps specialists.”
Santanu Paul, CEO of TalentSprint.
Commenting on the launch, Ram Konduru, Director of Executive Education at the CMU-SCS said, “We were exploring international markets like India, Middle East and Southeast Asian markets that have a growing demand for tech professionals. We wanted to collaborate with a serious edtech company that could align with our core competencies and help us reach out to new geographies. We are happy to announce our association with TalentSprint and launch our first program in DevOps.”
The Advanced Certificate Program in DevOps will help participants with in-depth knowledge of various new-age DevOps tools. The 6-month high-impact program, designed and taught by the expert faculty of CMU-SCS, who are globally renowned thought leaders in DevOps such as Professor Len Bass, and research scientists Hasan Yassar and Joseph Yankel. On successful completion, participants will receive CMU’s globally recognized certificate. The program will be delivered on TalentSprint’s digital platform ipearl.ai. Applications for this program are open.
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CORPORATE LEARNING SYSTEMS
Cornerstone | September 14, 2022
Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc., a leader in adaptive HR solutions, today announced several advancements to EdCast, the industry-leading Learning Experience Platform (LXP) acquired by Cornerstone in May 2022. New skills capabilities, deepened cross-platform integrations and more intuitive insights and dashboards top the list of the latest capabilities being delivered since the acquisition to help customers improve people growth and business productivity. In the past five months, we have made tremendous strides in strengthening the connections between the EdCast and Cornerstone offerings,” said Himanshu Palsule, CEO of Cornerstone. Our priority is to deliver more value to combined customers and their users, while ensuring the EdCast LXP is still open, independent and available broadly to any organization with different learning management tools. We are invested in EdCast and bringing to life innovation that revolutionizes the learning and development market.
Some of the most recent enhancements to EdCast include:
Enriched User Experience: EdCast customers can now take advantage of an updated user experience across products and channels based on a new design system. The new experience provides improved user experience consistency across the platform, visual design with more modern visual identity, improved accessibility standards and more seamless connection between mobile and desktop.
Enhanced Learner & Manager Dashboards: Updates to EdCast’s learner dashboard allow employees to connect to one another more intuitively, track their progress, manage their skills profiles and further personalize their learning experience. Manager dashboards provide new actionable insights with a singular view of how their teams are learning, what skills they have and at what level, and assign new relevant and timely learning content to engage them as an active participant in their team’s development.
New In the Flow of Work Integrations: The next evolution of the EdCast Integrations Hub includes an enterprise-level workflow automation platform with ready-to-use connectors across a variety of enterprise applications and content providers, and the ability to create customized connectors, ensuring customers can seamlessly incorporate learning into the platforms their people are already using. This includes EdCast’s latest integration with Zoom Video Communication, Inc., which embeds learning and training tools within Zoom Meetings to drive productivity and upskilling in the flow of work.
Subject Matter Expert (SME) Empowerment: The EdCast platform now offers more power to internal SMEs so they can share their knowledge and skills with others across their organization. Employees can create their own learning badges to showcase and celebrate skill development and expertise. Employees can also share certification on LinkedIn to promote their skills outside of their organization.While Cornerstone is committed to keeping the EdCast product open and platform-agnostic, the company has also invested in deeper integrations with Cornerstone's existing learning and talent solutions. Together, joint customers will have improved end-to-end content experiences for learners regardless of where they consume learning via a native inline player. A new integration between EdCast and the Cornerstone Skills Graph opens up a taxonomy of over 53,000 skills to develop skill profiles and make skill recommendations based on job roles.
Following its acquisition by Cornerstone, EdCast continues to receive industry recognition for its outstanding leadership in the market. Most recently, MyGuide, the Digital Adoption Product (DAP) offering from EdCast, was recognized as a major contender in Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix for DAP Technology.
"EdCast is a critical part of our product portfolio at Cornerstone, and our team is diligently focused on doing what we originally set out to do when we launched EdCast: provide the best learning experience platform on the market,The amount of integration progress we’ve made in this short amount of time is astounding, and we have long-term plans to continue at this pace of innovation and transform learning at work.”
Karl Mehta, Managing Director, EdCast by Cornerstone
About Cornerstone
Cornerstone powers the future-ready workforce with adaptive HR solutions designed to unite technology, data and content and inspire a work environment of growth, agility and success for all. With an AI-powered, skills-forward, experiential system designed for the contemporary workforce, we help organizations modernize their learning and development experience, deliver the most relevant content from anywhere, accelerate talent and career mobility and establish skills as the universal language of growth and success across their business. Cornerstone serves over 7,000 customers and 90M users and is available in 180 countries and 50 languages.
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