Martech brands offer breaks, new tech for businesses to manage coronavirus impact

In response to the coronavirus outbreak, many martech platforms are doing what they can to support our community, offering services and tools for businesses already feeling the impact from the pandemic.

Here is a quick list of the responses we’ve seen. If your martech company is making similar efforts, please let us know and we’ll update this list.

Box offers free 90-day Business Plan

Box is currently offering a free version of its content management platform. The company’s CEO tweeted on Thursday any small and medium businesses in need of the tool will be able to sign up for the Box Business edition to use free of charge for 90-days. Box Business includes unlimited storage, up to 5 GB of file uploads, advanced user and security reporting, mobile security controls and more.

RPA solution for event cancellations and refunds

Using its robotic process automation technology, CampTek Software has developed a robot that automates tasks associated with cancellations and refunds for large, global conferences. “We feel compelled to do something about this growing crisis,” said CampTek Software’s CTO Peter Camp about the increasing number of conferences and events that have been cancelled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Alibaba releases ecommerce tools

The Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba is putting in motion a set of ecommerce solutions designed to help B2C retailers that have been negatively impacted by the virus. The goal is to help these companies overcome the sudden challenges caused by the outbreak, things like limited access to supplies, drops in consumer demand, and decreasing foot traffic. To address these issues, the company is delivering a solution that would allow retailers to launch an ecommerce platform in as quick as five days via the Alibaba Cloud platform.

“Retailers are in urgent need of a digital enterprise platform and ready-to-deploy ecommerce system to continue growing their businesses despite the uncertainty,” said Selina Yuan, Alibaba Cloud’s resident of international business, “Our suite of solutions is to facilitate this process quickly and securely, making ecommerce a sustainable option for offline retailers to carry on with business as usual.”

CabinetM introduces “Social Distancing” martech stack

CabinetM, a marketing technology management platform, has rolled out an interactive “Social Distancing” Technology Stack, giving companies an easy way to research technology solutions that may be helpful during the coming months. The interactive platform showcases tools across various categories, including teleconferencing tools, video conferencing platforms, virtual team tools, file sharing tools and more.

Users can click on the tool they are researching from the “Social Distancing” Technology Stack website to see a product overview, features, function and other specifications.

YouTube allows creators to monetize coronavirus content

After initially suspending monetization on videos that referenced the coronavirus as part of its “sensitive events” policy, YouTube announced it is now enabling ads for videos that include coronavirus commentary for a limited number of channels.

“Our sensitive events policy was designed to apply to short-term events of significant magnitude, like a natural disaster,” wrote YouTube on its Creator Blog, “It’s becoming clear this issue is now an ongoing and important part of everyday conversation, and we want to make sure news organizations and creators can continue producing quality videos in a sustainable way.”

The company said it will be reviewing its enforcement processes and extending monetization for more creators and news organizations over the coming weeks.