Data annotation, or the process of adding labels to images, text, audio and other forms of sample data, is typically a key step in developing AI systems. The vast majority of systems learn to make predictions by associating labels with specific data samples, like the caption “bear” with a photo of a black bear. A system trained on many labeled examples of different kinds of contracts, for example, would eventually learn to distinguish between those contracts and even extrapolate to contracts that it hasn’t seen before.
The trouble is, annotation is a manual and labor-intensive process that’s historically been assigned to gig workers on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. But with the soaring interest in AI — and in the data used to train that AI — an entire industry has sprung up around tools for annotation and labeling.
Dataloop, one of the many startups vying for a foothold in the nascent market, today announced that it raised $33 million in a Series B round led by Nokia Growth Partners (NGP) Capital and Alpha Wave Global. Dataloop develops software and services for automating aspects of data prep, aiming to shave time off of the AI system development process.
“I worked at Intel for over 13 years, and that’s where I met Dataloop’s second co-founder and CPO, Avi Yashar,” Dataloop CEO Eran Shlomo told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Together with Avi, I left Intel and founded Dataloop. Nir [Buschi], our CBO, joined us as third co-founder, after he held executive positions [at] technology companies and [lead] business and go-to-market at venture-backed startups.”
Dataloop initially focused on data annotation for computer vision and video analytics. But in recent years, the company has added new tools for text, audio, form and document data and allowed customers to integrate custom data applications developed in-house.
One of the more recent additions to the Dataloop platform is data management dashboards for unstructured data. (As opposed to structured data, or data that’s arranged in a standardized format, unstructured data isn’t organized according to a common model or schema.) Each provides tools for data versioning and searching metadata, as well as a query language for querying datasets and visualizing data samples.
Image Credits: Dataloop
Image Credits: Dataloop
“All AI models are learned from humans through the data labeling process. The labeling process is essentially a knowledge encoding process in which a human teaches the machine the rules using positive and negative data examples,” Shlomo said. “Every AI application’s primary goal is to create the ‘data flywheel effect’ using its customer’s data: a better product leads to more users leads to more data and subsequently a better product.”
Dataloop competes against heavyweights in the data annotation and labeling space, including Scale AI, which has raised over $600 million in venture capital. Labelbox is another major rival, having recently nabbed more than $110 million in a financing round led by SoftBank. Beyond the startup realm, tech giants, including Google, Amazon, Snowflake and Microsoft, offer their own data annotation services.
Dataloop must be doing something right. Shlomo claims the company currently has “hundreds” of customers across retail, agriculture, robotics, autonomous vehicles and construction, although he declined to reveal revenue figures.
An open question is whether Dataloop’s platform solves some of the major challenges that exist in data labeling today. Last year, a paper published out of MIT found that data labeling tends to be highly inconsistent, potentially harming the accuracy of AI systems. A growing body of academic research suggests that annotators introduce their own biases when labeling data — for example, labeling phrases in African American English (a modern dialect spoken primarily by Black Americans) as more toxic than the general American English equivalents. These biases often manifest in unfortunate ways; think moderation algorithms that are more likely to ban Black users than white users.
Data labelers are also notoriously underpaid. The annotators who contributed captions to ImageNet, one of the better-known open source computer vision libraries, reportedly made a median of $2 per hour in wages.
Shlomo says it’s incumbent on the companies using Dataloop’s tools to affect change — not necessarily Dataloop itself.
“We see the underpayment of annotators as a market failure. Data annotation shares many qualities with software development, one of them being the impact of talent on productivity,” Shlomo said. “[As for bias,] bias in AI starts with the question that the AI developer chooses to ask and the instructions they supply to the labeling companies. We call it the ‘primary bias.’ For example, you could never identify color bias unless you ask for skin color in your labeling recipe. The primary bias issue is something the industry and regulators should address. Technology alone will not solve the issue.”
To date, Dataloop, which has 60 employees, has raised $50 million in venture capital. The company plans to grow its workforce to 80 employees by the end of the year.
If you’re on a Galaxy Fold, consider unfolding your phone or viewing it in full screen to best optimize your experience.
Credit Cards
Banks
Brokers
Crypto
Mortgages
Insurances
Loans
Small Business
Knowledge
by Rose Wheeler | Updated Aug. 5, 2022 – First published on May 18, 2022
Image source: Getty Images
Your small business needs a system for managing content and your website, but not everyone has an unlimited budget. Finding the best CMS, though, doesn’t have to break the bank and can, in fact, be free!
The best free CMS software should still meet the same qualifications that you’d have for building a paid site. It should be easy enough to use, and it should produce a professional-looking finished product, making it a CMS software that delivers on the quality you expect of a professional business site.
Your content should match your business. The ability to be dynamic and tailored to your central themes and usability is a must as your business scales and changes. Your CMS should be adaptable in the future and should be able to be set up from day one to feel unique to your own business.
To expand reach, your content needs to be seen. The best way to get in front of the most eyes and be discovered by new audiences is to rank in search engine algorithms.
By being set up for SEO success right away, your CMS lets you build a site that looks good and functions as you want it to, while still drawing in visitors for you without any extra work, money, or time spent.
The bottom line is that you’re going to be using your CMS on an almost-daily basis, so it needs to be easy and comfortable for you to use. The learning curve should be manageable, the setup not too stressful, and ongoing maintenance easy enough to do. No crazy coding or hard-to-navigate dashboards here!
The right CMS application can be free. Keeping in mind essential qualities and expected deliverables, these are our favorite free CMS options.
WordPress started as the premier blogging platform but has grown to be the top free, open-source CMS website.
As a leading web builder, WordPress is not only free as-is (which is pretty expansive), but it also offers over 50,000 plugins, covering everything from upgraded themes to creating landing pages, social media marketing, and almost anything else you can imagine or want.
Because it’s open-source, WordPress is free to use and build your site on. Plus, it’s also a flexible and scalable option. Uploading and managing media are easy tasks, and you can even embed links and highlight video content.
When it comes to editing, you have the simplicity of dragging and dropping content blocks and media into the library while storing them safely and populating them directly into your web pages.
You can also preview your pages before setting them live, so you know everything will look and flow just right.
WordPress has a super simple media manager and content uploader. Image source: Author
WordPress has several free options for themes and customization that can modify your entire site and theme from one hub, rather than page by page. Efficiency and customizability are high on WordPress’ list.
Read The Ascent’s full WordPress review
Weebly may have paid plans, but it also has a free tier that doesn’t sacrifice its efficiency or ease of use and still has many features. The library of templates is continuously updating and stays dynamic.
You have several choices (free options included) that are easy to design and look super professional. Weebly sites are automatically optimized for desktop and mobile viewing, too, for SEO purposes and easy viewing.
Weebly’s standard themes are eye-catching and easy to customize. Also, you can opt to pay for a more extensively designed third-party theme template. Image source: Author
Though Weebly’s first paid option is super affordable (a mere $6 per month when billed annually), it also has a free basic plan you can use for as long as you want.
Read The Ascent’s full Weebly review
Wix is similar to Weebly because it has paid plans, too, and gives you an unlimited free option.
Whether paid or free, though, you have access to beautiful designs, either via template or by building them through its drag-and-drop builder. The dashboard is intuitive and easy to understand, and, best of all, you need to know precisely zero coding to use any part of Wix.
This system loves customization. You can develop your entire site theme and color palette around a central logo and by answering a few questions about your business, getting a professional-looking site up in no time. Ongoing management of content is a breeze since editing is just as easy as building.
The Wix color picker is almost magical, making life easier for creatives everywhere. Image source: Author
Wix does have those paid options, but since there is a long-term free option, you can use Wix for free forever.
Read The Ascent’s full Wix review
Prioritizing a lack of clutter and a streamlined solution, Bolt is an open-source, free CMS determined to provide an efficient system. It’s made by front-end developers who know what it takes to make something easy to use.
The design is modern, and the tools are intuitive. It allows you to focus on creating pages, editing content, and producing deliverables rather than learning a ton of coding or backend technology.
The lack of bells and whistles means that what it does do, it does really well. And those functions (managing content, creating a dynamic user experience, seeing top-line analytics, etc.) are essential in a good CMS.
Bolt’s file system is organized and free of clutter. Image source: Author
The templates look pretty professional, and setting it all up is quick and easy. Another great feature is its page loading time, as the content is designed to load up quickly. Though there is some coding involved, you don’t need to do anything from scratch. Managing it is easy and stress-free.
Read The Ascent’s full Bolt review
Yet another open-source CMS, Drupal has a large, knowledgeable community of designers, developers, editors, builders, etc. It’s great for hosting sites that are large and tend to need a lot of bandwidth, have constant uptime, and present a professional look.
Drupal is also super flexible, so you can adapt your site to almost any use and have it scale as your business grows. You will most likely need to hire a developer to get it set up, as this option is not code-free. You’ll need to build the infrastructure, but after it’s built, it’s pretty easy to manage and use on an ongoing basis.
There are many themes and site customizations you can decide to use, and every theme auto optimizes for mobile as well as desktop so that you can capture the widest audience.
Building pages involves that beloved drag-and-drop capability, so site building and page editing are relatively straightforward. There’s also no coding involved in editing and uploading content.
Easily organized content, easy-to-understand editing. Image source: Author
Despite some initial development costs, Drupal stays afloat as a free builder that’s easy enough to use.
Read The Ascent’s full Drupal review
A good CMS can cost a lot, or it can cost almost nothing. Despite shelling out $0, you can set yourself up with a system that’s rich in features, functions, scalability, and flexibility.
Though open-source, free plans lack dedicated account management. However, there is usually a vast wealth of online resources that can set you up for any level of success. If your budget is tight, exploring one of these five free options may be your best bet.
Cash back, travel rewards, 0% intro APR financing: all of these can be great credit card perks for business owners. But how do you find the right business credit card for you? There are tons of offers on the market today, and sifting through them to find the right one can be a big hassle. So we've done the hard work for you.
Get started with one of our top business credit card picks of 2022 today.
Rose Wheeler is a content management expert writing for The Ascent and The Motley Fool.
We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.
The Ascent is a Motley Fool service that rates and reviews essential products for your everyday money matters.
Copyright © 2018 – 2022 The Ascent. All rights reserved.
Our cloud-based talent management software gives your employees, managers, and HR professionals the tools and guidance they need to succeed – regardless of where or when they’re working. With SAP SuccessFactors solutions, you can hire the best candidates, engage employees, develop their skills, and make sure that every employee is rewarded and valued with mobile self-services available anytime, anywhere.
Upcoming Webcast
Boost employee satisfaction with five strategies for workforce development.
Watch now
From attracting the right candidates to developing, motivating, and retaining them, our talent management solutions can help you deliver personalized experiences from hire to retire.
Global talent sourcing
Deliver the talent that can drive your transformation and long-term business success.
Candidate engagement
Meet your candidates where they are with a mobile-first candidate experience.
Candidate relationship management
Nurture passive candidates to address hard-to-fill and critical roles.
Comprehensive applicant management
Automate and simplify low-value tasks so you can focus more on candidates.
Engaging onboarding portal
Improve the new-hire experience, engage hiring managers, and give HR the administration and monitoring tools it needs.
Paperless new-hire administration
Help new hires quickly complete required paperwork with e-signatures on any device.
Onboarding, offboarding, and cross-boarding
Support all employee movements, like internal transitions and employees leaving, in a streamlined and efficient way.
Improved administration
Automate workflows for everything from offer letters to new hire paperwork to employee transitions.
Expanded mobile accessibility
Send, review, and sign documents anywhere at your convenience – with network support for iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile.
Enhanced integration
Increase productivity by integrating common document authoring, document management, and identity management systems.
Employee goal management
Capture employee efforts, achievements, and comments – all with the convenience of using any device, anytime and anywhere.
Continuous performance management
Facilitate regular, productive conversations to maximize employee performance.
Performance reviews and evaluations
Get better-quality reviews, promote faster user adoption, and increase completion rates with a simple, engaging experience.
Guided action planning
Track improvements with action planning tools to help ensure that the changes you make drive results.
Capability-based framework
Move beyond skills and competencies to drive unique opportunities to people based on who they are and who they want to be.
Intelligent workforce development
Empower people to learn by providing proactive guidance based on experience, interests, and your organizational priorities.
Team-centered approach
Eliminate barriers to help people better connect, align, and perform in dynamic teams so they can thrive in an agile work environment.
Modern and engaging learner experiences
Set a positive learner experience and continuous learning culture at the center of everything your business does.
Compliance training
Minimize legal risk with employee compliance training.
Mobile Learning
Let your employees access learning wherever and whenever needed – offline and on any device
Exceptional content and partner innovations
Use our extended partner network with content from Open Content Network partners and other third-party innovations.
Succession planning and leadership development
Assess employee potential to identify, develop, and retain the people you need to build a talent pipeline for critical roles.
Employee and career development planning
Empower employees to take control over their own career development planning and career path.
Talent reviews and calibration tools
Help ensure fair and objective assessments so that you can identify the right future leaders.
Compensation design
Optimize your compensation programs with advanced modeling and forecasting capabilities based on best practices.
Compensation planning
Manage rewards and compensation effectively based on real-time insights through a single, unified solution.
Reward and recognition
Motivate your employees to perform at their best through timely recognition awards and acknowledgments.
See what our customers are saying about SAP SuccessFactors solutions.
See why the IDC MarketScape has positioned SAP as a Leader in the latest vendor assessment of integrated talent management and learning solutions.
We’re in the midst of a once-in-a-generation change in the ways people work. Find out how learning and development can help make it a change for the better.
Assess the critical role of your workforce in achieving transformation goals and business outcomes, while focusing on learning, development, and the employee experience.
Search the list below to find answers to frequently asked questions for talent management.
SAP SuccessFactors Learning is a corporate learning management system (LMS) that provides a modern environment to help companies cultivate a culture of continuous learning. Internally, it provides personalized, collaborative, and blended learning experiences that help employees develop new skills. It also improves regulatory compliance and reduces legal risk by automating compliance training. Externally, the software allows companies to offer unique learning experiences for their external audiences with e-commerce capabilities that make it possible to offer for-profit courses and training.
SAP Workforce Performance Builder has transitioned to SAP Enable Now, a collaborative content authoring, management, and sharing platform. SAP Enable Now can help companies efficiently create, maintain, and deliver learning materials and documentation. It allows you to give employees the knowledge they need, in the format they prefer, to help improve workforce productivity, software adoption, and the end-user experience. The software also works with both SAP and third-party systems.
Intelligent user assistance is a Web assistant offered through SAP Enable Now Framework. It provides customizable, context-sensitive help embedded into SAP SuccessFactors solutions and other cloud solutions from SAP. Intelligent user assistance allows team members to quickly pull up learning tutorials, guided tours, how-to videos, and more in real time. Employees can work more efficiently with one-click access to up-to-date help materials. And content authors benefit from continuous updates and the ability to customize and extend materials to fit their needs. The Web assistant helps teams to keep up with the pace of constant innovation cycles and transfer knowledge between employees.
SAP SuccessFactors Talent solutions help HR teams attract, retain, develop, and engage the right talent to meet business goals. The cloud solutions support efficient recruiting and onboarding, performance and goals management, compensation, continuous learning, and leadership and talent development. Together, they make it easier to develop talent at every level, anticipate and bridge talent gaps, and improve organizational strength.
SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development is SAP’s employee development software. It provides opportunities for employees to expand their skill sets and explore career paths, helping to cultivate the next generation of leaders and address talent gaps. This happens through dialogue and ongoing feedback, mentoring programs, leadership development plans, and more. Developing and retaining talent is key to the overall employee experience, and it helps reduce attrition and boost productivity.
By Matthew Finnegan
Senior Reporter, Computerworld |
Microsoft’s Office apps have long been the dominant enterprise productivity tools, with Google Workspace its key rival. But newcomers have emerged in recent years that promise new approaches to document creation.
Two of the well-funded startups leading the charge — Coda and Notion — offer their own takes on modern “all-in-one” workspace apps, combining elements of docs, spreadsheets, databases, wikis and more into a single interactive page that can integrate data from different sources.
The two companies recently announced new features to their respective platforms as they seek to challenge the productivity app incumbents.
“Coda and Notion have developed innovative approaches to collaborative document creation that aim to address the limitations of traditional spreadsheets and word processors — namely, the need to enhance the user experience with intelligent automation and enabling a tighter integration to existing workflows,” said Raúl Castañón, senior analyst at 451 Research, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
“These emerging ‘living documents’ will likely impact the competitive landscape and, for some companies, represent a viable alternative to Google’s or Microsoft’s productivity and collaboration apps.”
Notion, which launched its app in 2016 and has 25 million users, unveiled a host of new features at its Block by Block event this week.
Among them is a new app sidebar that lets users create dedicated spaces for Notion content. These sections can be allocated to specific teams, such as marketing or sales, or cross-functional projects such as a product launch, to organize work more effectively, said Notion in a blog post. Teams can be designated as public or private to ensure the appropriate individuals are able to access sensitive information, and restrictions can be applied to individual pages within a team for more granular control.
The feature will be rolled out gradually from this spring, Notion said.
Notion gets a new teams sidebar that can be used to create dedicated spaces.
New ways to visualize shared data are coming in a few weeks, with the addition of quick filters in the Notion database view that can be saved and recalled at a later point. Users will be able to switch between custom view tabs at the top of a database, and access customization options in a settings panel.
An update to Notion databases, due later this year, will let users sync structured data in the app with external sources, such as Google Calendar, Jira, and GitHub.
Other updates at Notion’s user event on Thursday, include the general availability of the Notion API alongside added API functionality such as enhanced admin controls and documentation. A Notion Certified Program has been launched to help Notion power users expand their expertise with official accreditation as external consultants or internal admins, while a Notion Champions Community provides a place for enthusiasts to connect and share advice as well as interact directly with Notion.
Coda, which launched its app in 2019, announced its 3.0 release last week. The updated software includes an overhauled editor tool, the result of a two-year-long development process, CEO and co-founder, Shishir Mehrotra, said in a blog post.
One facet of the new editor is the ability customize page layouts more easily, using a drag-and-drop interface to rearrange blocks of text as needed. This combines the benefits of two types of editor tools, said Coda — those used for writing and those used by publishers, for example in wikis or website design. “Being able to use the same surface for authoring and publishing opens up a wide set of scenarios,” said Coda, pointing to a portfolio website, team wiki, or dashboard for displaying OKRs and metrics as options.
Another feature of the new editor is the canvas column. This lets users insert a Coda page — with images, tables, and comments — into a spreadsheet row; it can be used for purposes such as writing draft blog posts directly from a content calendar, Coda said.
Coda 3.0’s updated editor tool offers Canvas columns.
The other updates include changes to Coda Packs, which launched in Coda 1.0 to let users create custom automations that interact with third-party apps, such as a button to send emails from a doc with the Gmail Pack.
With the launch of Pack Studio in Coda 3.0, users can build their own Packs in minutes using a browser interface, said Coda, requiring minimal coding knowledge. These can be for use internally across an organization, or shared more widely in the Coda Gallery marketplace, where they can be listed as free to use or paid.
The updates by Coda and Notion align with key requirements for business users identified in 451 Research’s survey data, said Castañón, namely by providing greater connectivity across productivity apps.
The analyst firm’s research highlighted some of the top obstacles affecting team productivity for business. They include: information siloed in different applications (28%), a lack of integration between applications (26%), and difficulties in collaborating effectively across applications (21%).
Other opportunities for productivity improvement cited by respondents include the integration of data from different applications into a workflow (31%), reporting the progress of work against goals (24%), and the creation of documents, spreadsheets, and slides (24%).
These priorities are not lost on Microsoft or Google. Both vendors have been updating their own productivity apps to provide greater flexibility for users. For Google, this led to the smart canvas concept and greater connectivity between apps such as Docs, Sheets, and Slides, as well as its collaboration tools such as Meet and Chat.
Microsoft has been building out its Fluid Framework for some time, culminating in the creation of the Loop app, announced last year and currently in preview, which appears to be a more direct to challenger to newcomers such as Coda and Notion.
While Coda and Notion have proved popular, Castañón doesn’t expect they will displace Microsoft and Google’s apps anytime soon.
“Rather, they are complementary tools intended to address use cases that traditional word processors and spreadsheets were not designed for,” he said, with capabilities for real-time and asynchronous collaboration, integration to systems of record, team project management, and workflow automation.
“More likely, we will see an intermediate stage where they coexist side by side with Microsoft and Google apps, providing some level of integration,” said Castañón.
Related: 3 next-level note-taking apps that’ll change the way you work
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.