It's been almost five months exactly since we launched BlueWing with an email to family and friends. A ton has happened since then. Here's an update on where we stand right now.

Despite account-based marketing’s recent resurgence, the foundational ideas of the approach have been around for years. According to ITSMA’s Bev Burgess, who coined the name “Account-Based Marketing” in 2003, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers first introduced the tenets of ABM in their prescient book The One to One Future. 23 years later, digital technology has given companies the tools to execute Pepper’s and Roger’s ideas at an unprecedented scale.

It’s just Google’s world and we’re all living in it. And now that’s a mobile-first world, Google’s rewriting the rules of the internet. Again. Google recently announced that it will prioritize mobile-first indexes over desktop indexes. If you are wondering what that means, then here’s a translation in plain English: Google will use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, even when you are searching from a desktop.

Every B2B brand, new or old, knows they need to market themselves. It’s just a matter of how. The marketing of the past emphasized sales-y ad spots on television, radio and print; cold calls; direct mail; billboards—your standard outbound marketing. The marketing of today is a different beast. Inbound marketing has proven to be very successful at attracting leads and prospects to your business by drawing them inwards. To do that, here is a list of five B2B inbound marketing techniques your company can utilize.

Email. The great connector and distractor. There are seemingly no standards for how we email one another, despite it being one of the internet's oldest protocols. (If you've ever gotten an email with the entire message in the subject line, you know what I mean. No subject line at all is better, IMO.) Checking our inboxes has become a mildly suspenseful and blatantly addictive part of our lives.

When I first set up my BlueWing address, I relished having a fresh inbox. I had some space to think about how email enables and disables my day-to-day productivity—and I came to two conclusions.

First of all, improving my ability to resist checking email every 10 minutes is crucial, so I can stay focused on more thoughtful work. Secondly, I've accepted that I'm going to have my inbox tab open all day, so I might as well make the time I spend there as efficient and meaningful as possible. In attempting to optimize my relationship with email, I researched the most useful Gmail plugins on the market, many of which I use in my own inbox. Take a look below.

Investment in artificial intelligence startups is exploding. According to venture capital data company CB Insights, equity funding for AI companies reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, and "over 200 AI-focused companies have raised nearly $1.5B" so far this year.

Artificial intelligence's applications extend far beyond the design of human-like robots. Fans of HBO's Silicon Valley might be familiar with Pied Piper's "neural net," the artificial intelligence layer that makes their compression algorithm smarter without any additional human brainpower. (Or, more importantly, human brain-hours.) In the real world, from which Silicon Valley borrows heavily, Facebook and other technology companies are looking to take advantage of AI in similar ways.

The potential use cases for AI in the social media space are far-reaching. Unsurprisingly, Facebook has emerged as one of the key players, leading the charge with both massive internal projects and select acquisitions of smaller companies. Here's what they're up to and why.