I compared six leading lead scoring platforms for 2026 based on scoring flexibility, predictive capabilities, data quality, automation, CRM fit, and overall value for sales and marketing teams.
The post Best Lead Scoring Software for Sales and Marketing Teams in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.
I compared six leading lead scoring platforms for 2026 based on scoring flexibility, predictive capabilities, data quality, automation, CRM fit, and overall value for sales and marketing teams.
The post Best Lead Scoring Software for Sales and Marketing Teams in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.
— Aneesh Raman has taken the role of chief economic opportunity officer at Microsoft. He previously held the same title at LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary where he worked for five years.
The job is focused on “helping companies, including our own, build and deploy AI tools in ways that will unlock new levels of economic opportunity and human capability for workers and workforces alike,” Raman said.
Raman, who is based in San Francisco, began his career as a TV journalist and served as a speechwriter for President Obama and other political leaders. More recently he was an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom and led economic impact for Facebook.
— Jenny Lay-Flurrie was promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft‘s Trusted Technology Group. In February, she had taken the role of vice president and head of Trusted Technology, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory compliance, responsible AI use and related topics.
Lay-Flurrie announced the change on LinkedIn, saying that she was “honoured, humbled and a little lost for words (yes,, it does occasionally happen ;)).”
The tech leader has been with Microsoft since 2005, and led the company’s efforts on accessibility and disability inclusion for more than a decade.
— Brian Gill has resigned as chief product and technology officer for DAT Freight & Analytics, a Beaverton, Ore.-based freight company. Gill was with DAT for more than three years and previously served as CPO for Nordstrom.
In a LinkedIn post, Gill did not give specifics on his next move but said he would be “rolling up my sleeves and building the many ideas that are suddenly so much easier to bring to life.”
Gill’s other past roles include executive positions at Hotwire and nearly a decade at Expedia. Last month DAT announced multiple promotions and hires to its leadership team.
— Colin Newman has joined Zillow Group as head of public policy. He was previously director of U.S. public policy for Amazon, leading initiatives on employment, workforce transformation, AI, transportation and economic development. He first took a government affairs role with Amazon’s Audible business in 2015 and moved to Amazon five years ago.
“I look forward to leveraging my government, legal, and public policy experience to support our efforts to simplify and democratize the housing process for everyone,” Newman said. His background includes legal counsel for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
— Lisa Finnegan is returning to Microsoft as vice president and human resources business partner for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Finnegan, who is based in Dublin, was previously with LinkedIn for more than eight years, departing in March 2025. Her interim role was with Lumera HR Consulting.
“It’s a pretty incredible time to (re)join Microsoft and the opportunity to help shape the people and organisation agenda across EMEA at this critical moment is incredibly compelling,” she said.
— James Lau, chief product officer at Hiya, announced this is his last week at the Seattle startup, which battles fraudulent calls and provides technology to protect voice identity. He’s been in the role for three years and previously worked at Microsoft over multiple stints.
Lau is launching a company called Entrovox, which he describes as an AI phone team that helps insurance agencies land new customers through state-of-the-art AI voice agents, branded caller ID and smart campaigns.
“There has never been a more exciting time for building, and I am deeply passionate about voice AI. Making AI sound genuinely human is a challenge I find irresistible,” Lau said.
— Jason Wilbur has left Oracle to join OpenAI‘s Seattle office as a leader in cloud partnerships.
Wilbur was with Oracle over two stints spanning more than six years and leaves the role of senior director of product management. Past jobs include CEO at Aarno Labs, co-founder of Require Security, and senior product manager at Amazon.
— Julia Liuson was appointed to Elastic’s board of directors. Earlier this year, Liuson resigned from Microsoft after more than 34 years. She was most recently president of Microsoft’s Developer Division. San Francisco’s Elastic bills itself as the “search AI company.”
— Dan Walter was promoted to vice president of fission technology for Everett, Wash.-based Zap Energy. Walter joined Zap earlier this year as the clean power startup announced it was expanding to pursue fission micro-reactors as well as fusion-based nuclear energy. Zap is No. 11 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
Walter was previously at TerraPower for nearly a decade, most recently in a director role for the nuclear power company.
— Kelsey Wolf has joined next-gen battery company Group14 Technologies as director of communications and marketing. Wolf was previously the communications lead for Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that went bankrupt and was acquired this past spring. Group14 is No. 34 on the GeekWire 200.
“I’ve spent my career telling exciting stories about technology that changes how we work, how we find home, and how we move around the world. Up next, I will get to tell stories about the technology and materials powering our world,” she said.
— Tin Can, a Seattle startup selling Wi-Fi-enabled landline phones for kids, announced three hires:
Tin Can, which launched last year, is No. 153 on the GeekWire 200.
— EchoMark, the Bellevue, Wash., startup using forensic watermarking to identify the source of information leaks, has named Alex Gamoran vice president of enterprise sales. Gamoran was previously at Smartsheet for nearly a decade, leaving as regional vice president of commercial sales for North America.
“It struck me that every security-conscious enterprise is going to need a solution to the types of information leaks that conventional security software is blind to — and that’s when I knew I wanted to be part of EchoMark,” Gamoran said via email.
— Sara Dutta was named director of AI innovation and partnerships for Seattle biopharmaceutical company Omeros. She previously founded the life sciences consultancy Ocilisni and was a director at Novo Nordisk, focused on external partnerships and emerging technologies.
Last year, Omeros struck a deal worth up to $2.1 billion with Novo Nordisk, giving the latter exclusive global rights to develop and commercialize a clinical-stage drug candidate that treats rare blood and kidney disorders. Omeros won Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.
— Rebekah Bastian announced that she is leaving mpathic as chief marketing officer. She joined the Bellevue, Wash., startup working to make AI safe in December. Bastian previously launched and was CEO of the life-and-career social platform OwnTrail. She was with Zillow Group for more than 14 years and also worked at GlowForge.
“I’m giving myself some intentional time to explore ideas and let them incubate before deciding where they lead,” she said. That could include new companies or initiatives within existing companies, and her areas of focus span “human agency, creative entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and generally how humans find meaning and thrive in the age of AI.”
— Seattle-area wine recommendation startup Theodora has appointed Heather Stephens founding marketing lead. Stephens has worked for more than a decade in consumer and B2B marketing, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy development.
— Marc Brown, former global head of M&A and strategic investments at Microsoft and now managing director of venture capital coverage at JPMorgan, has joined the board of trustees of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, an organization supporting civic engagement for young people.
— Adrienne Lopez, a Seattle-based marketing leader who has worked on initiatives with organizations including Meta, WhatsApp, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, was named executive vice president of WH Inc.
— Washington Research Foundation announced its new cohort of venture analysts: Jessica Ayers, Ankit Azad, Nello Gu, Michael Malone and Elya Shamskhou. The program helps graduate students and postdoctoral fellows gain expertise in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship.
I compared the best sales analytics software for revenue teams, including ZoomInfo, Salesforce, Clari, Gong, and HubSpot CRM. See which platforms are best for account intelligence, forecasting, CRM reporting, deal analysis, and cross-system analytics.
The post Best Sales Analytics Software for Revenue Teams appeared first on TechRepublic.
I compared the best sales analytics software for revenue teams, including ZoomInfo, Salesforce, Clari, Gong, and HubSpot CRM. See which platforms are best for account intelligence, forecasting, CRM reporting, deal analysis, and cross-system analytics.
The post Best Sales Analytics Software for Revenue Teams appeared first on TechRepublic.
Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, the fast-growing open-source database that has become a favorite of developers looking to analyze large amounts of data without the cost and setup of a cloud data warehouse.
Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project’s technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects.
Amazon says it is not acquiring the DuckDB open-source project itself. DuckDB will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation, as will the related DuckLake and Quack projects, according to DuckLabs.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September.
The deal fits Amazon’s broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it. It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage.
The move comes as the data industry shifts toward keeping information in open formats in cloud storage, where it can be queried directly rather than loaded into a separate warehouse.
The shift puts pressure on companies like Snowflake and Databricks, which sell the compute and governance layer on top of stored data. Both are major AWS partners as well as competitors, with large numbers of customers running on Amazon’s cloud.
AI has raised the stakes, driving up both the volume of data companies keep in the cloud and the cost of analyzing it. Amazon says DuckDB is a natural fit for AI agents, which query data much the way people do, poking and experimenting with small sets before deciding what they want.
“DuckDB ends up being naturally optimized for AI agents to use,” wrote Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the AWS VP who leads its cloud data services, in a post about the acquisition.
DuckLabs said it has worked closely with AWS in recent years, including on DuckDB support for Amazon’s S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse.
“DuckDB is an incredible open source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today,” said Andy Warfield, an AWS vice president and distinguished engineer, in a press release announcing the deal.
One of the companies watching closely is in Seattle. MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, was founded in partnership with the DuckLabs team and has worked with it closely for four years. Three of its engineers are among the top 10 outside contributors to the DuckDB project.
In a blog post Wednesday, MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani said Amazon is following a familiar pattern. “That’s Amazon’s playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service,” wrote Tigani, who helped start Google’s BigQuery and spent a decade there before co-founding MotherDuck in 2022.
He expects Amazon to do exactly that with DuckDB: “After all, they’re not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source,” he wrote. “We welcome the competition.”
He said the deal is likely to be good for DuckDB, because Amazon has a financial reason to keep the project open and healthy. “If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money,” he wrote.
Tigani said DuckLabs is being kept as a wholly owned subsidiary with its organization intact, and that the DuckDB Foundation has “iron clad control over the DuckDB IP.”
MotherDuck also said it is now offering enterprise support for DuckDB — which it had previously steered clear of to avoid competing with DuckLabs. Tigani said the company has Mühleisen and Raasveldt’s “explicit blessing” to take it on now that they are joining Amazon.
DuckLabs was founded a little more than five years ago as a long-term home for the DuckDB development team. The company turned down venture capital, stayed owned by its founders and employees, and grew to more than 30 people in Amsterdam, funding itself through support and feature-development contracts.
In a blog post, Mühleisen and Raasveldt wrote that they had come to worry DuckDB’s growth would outpace their ability to support it, and that their small company “could become a bottleneck for the project.” Building a larger sales and operations organization, they wrote, would have pulled the team away from the technical work that made DuckDB successful.
Nine days before the acquisition was announced, Mühleisen and Raasveldt published a preview of DuckDB 2.0, due this fall, declaring that the release “kicks off the year of DuckDB as a server.” It adds Quack, which lets one DuckDB instance serve data to others over a network, along with work aimed at speeding up queries against data held in object storage such as S3.
DuckLabs said the DuckDB Foundation will add a technical advisory board, giving leading community members input on the project’s technical direction. The company also plans to let DuckDB run extensions signed by outside developers and organizations.
If your summer sports head is spinning about the current state of the Seattle Mariners, perhaps it’d be better served focusing on “spin rate,” particularly as it relates to Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold.
The Seahawks are the subject of the latest season of HBO’s Hard Knocks, an inside look at training camp and how the team is preparing to defend its Super Bowl championship this season.
Episode 2 of the series premiered Tuesday night, and Darnold — in his second season with the team — was a highlight among an hour of TV that had many. The NFL was even compelled to post part of it on Instagram.
The Seahawks QB, along with the team’s passing game coordinator and one of Darnold’s primary receiving targets, all shared insight into why Darnold is an NFL leader when it comes to spin rate — and why it matters.
In a game increasingly loaded with analytics and Next Gen Stats, spin rate tracks the number of revolutions of the football while it’s in flight. The higher the rate, the tighter the spiral. The average NFL QB spin rate is 570. Darnold’s is “off the charts” at 639, according to Hard Knocks.
“From a young age, I’ve just been able to throw the football,” Darnold said on the show. “It was just something I always practiced. I’d be laying in bed with the football and just tossing it up to myself and trying to see how much I can spin it. And that’s just something I’ve always kind of been interested in and kind of a geek about.”
With a tight spiral on the football, the nose of the ball doesn’t tilt up or down, doesn’t wobble, and travels in a more effective manner to the receiver.
Veteran wide receiver Cooper Kupp knows there’s a science to throwing the ball, and he previously believed that spinning the ball too much made it harder to catch.
“I’ve now caught the ball from Sam for a year and a half, and now I’m not so sure,” Kupp said with a smile.
Darnold has been working on throwing a tight spiral since he was a kid tossing a football in the yard with his dad. Now when he generates a whip with his arm and the torque needed to throw the ball efficiently, he thinks about what’s ahead, particularly later in a season when weather can have a huge impact on the football.
HBO Sports is especially adept at capturing compelling footage on Hard Knocks. While Seattle, the Pacific Northwest and the Seahawks VMAC training facility on Lake Washington all make for a beautiful backdrop, it’s worth geeking out over Episode 2 for an extra-long shot of a Darnold pass in flight.
Set to a remix of the 1984 new wave hit “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by the English pop band Dead or Alive, the shot is totally on target.
Replacing CISO Burnout with Data-Driven Certainty The Ultimate Decision Maker CISOs and security decision-makers are being crushed under an untenable expectation: achieve near-perfection in an era where cyber risks increase...
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