MarTech Today: Building an Alexa skill, Quora’s new ad platform & cloud computing drives Microsoft

Here’s our recap of what happened in marketing technology, as reported on MarTech Today, Marketing Land and other places across the web.

From MarTech Today:

• Look internally to achieve external marketing impact and better results
  Jul 21, 2017 by Scott Vaughan
  Don’t focus all your marketing efforts on external customers and stakeholders. Columnist Scott Vaughan explains how stepping up your internal communications will boost your marketing results.

From Marketing Land:

• Building an Amazon Alexa Skill is so easy, Grandma can do it
  Jul 21, 2017 by Paul Shapiro
  How can you tap into the power of Amazon’s Alexa? Contributor Paul Shapiro walks you through the different types of Alexa Skills you can create and explains how to easily set up a Flash Briefing Skill.
• Here’s what performance advertisers are saying about Quora’s new ad platform
  Jul 21, 2017 by Ginny Marvin
  Whether they’ve been on the platform for one month or seven, advertiser feedback is strikingly similar: We like the performance — when can we scale?
• Cloud-computing growth drives Microsoft quarterly earnings beat
  Jul 21, 2017 by Greg Sterling
  Commercial Cloud revenue run-rate was just under $19B, almost $2B in phone-related losses helped, too.

From Around The Web:

• TUNE Announces New Fraud Prevention Solution, Empowers Marketers and Ad Partners to Fight Fraud, PR Newswire
• 3 Vendor-Created Barriers to AI Adoption, CMS Wire
• Top Web apps & Tools That All Bloggers Should Learn To Use, The Blog Herald
• What Are the Best Distribution Tools for Content Today?, CopyPressed

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.