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Evergage Named a Strong Performer Among Experience Optimization Platforms by Independent Research Firm

1-to-1 Personalization and Customer Data Platform Company Recognized for Strengths in Behavioral Targeting and Recommendations, as Well as High Customer Satisfaction Scores

Evergage, The 1-to-1 Platform company, today announced that Forrester Research, a leading global research and advisory firm, has ranked Evergage as a Strong Performer in its report “The Forrester Waveâ„¢: Experience Optimization Platforms, Q2 2018,” published today.

This first-ever Wave report on the experience optimization platform space examines the “eight providers that matter most,” noting: “Savvy optimization pros seek to personalize customer experience across digital touchpoints by adopting a continuous optimization strategy, which Forrester defines as: An analytics-driven approach that seeks to leverage every customer interaction to evolve the understanding of the customer – which is, in turn, used to evolve and optimize current and future customer experiences.” A complete experience optimization platform, according to Forrester, is one that offers “a software solution with advanced capabilities for online testing, behavioral targeting and recommendation provisions.”

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Addressing these capabilities from a single, consolidated platform is an increasing priority for companies today. Forrester notes: “CI [customer insights] pros have accelerated the consolidation of experience optimization practices in response to growing expectations that brands must deliver supreme, individualized digital experiences across an ever-growing breadth of digital touchpoints. On top of that, personalization must occur all within the context of the existing relationship, historical interactions and the customer’s needs at the moment of interaction.”

The Wave evaluated Evergage 1 – which provides a full suite of customer data platform (CDP), testing and real-time personalization capabilities, including targeting and 1-to-1 machine learning-driven recommendations and in-the-moment experiences. According to Forrester: “Evergage 1 differentiates itself with strong recommendations and behavioral targeting capabilities scores. Overall, Evergage has high customer satisfaction scores, with one reference stating, ‘Their ability to collaborate and listen to client needs, and then come up with a solution, is something that stands out to me.'”

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Evergage received the highest score among all vendors in the recommendations criterion, as well as the highest possible scores for the performance and supporting services criteria. Evergage also had among the highest scores in the platform experience criterion.

Karl Wirth
Karl Wirth

“Providing continuously optimized customer experiences is a critical differentiator for companies today – and Evergage is committed to helping them achieve this,” said Karl Wirth, Evergage CEO and author of the book “One-to-One Personalization in the Age of Machine Learning.” “We’re proud to be recognized as a Strong Performer in this Forrester Wave report – which, we feel, is a validation of our strategy, solution and customers’ successes. Evergage has invested in building a best-in-class personalization and customer data platform that gathers and processes deep behavioral and attribute data, and – powered by machine learning – delivers personalized, maximally relevant 1-to-1 experiences, across channels, in real time. Our inclusion in Forrester’s report, we feel, underscores our dedication to serving our customers’ needs and our commitment to innovation.”

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With its personalization and customer data platform, Evergage enables marketers to deliver individualized experiences in real time across websites, email, web and mobile apps, and onsite search. Evergage powers personalized experiences for more than 3 billion people across the world.

This inclusion comes on the heels of other recent honors for Evergage. Evergage was recognized as a winner in the SIIA CODiE Awards (“Best E-Commerce Solution“), as well as a gold (highest-level) Stevie® Award winner in The 2018 American Business Awards® within the last month, among other accolades. Last year, Evergage was named a Strong Performer in “The Forrester Waveâ„¢: Digital Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2017” report.

The news also comes amidst other milestones and momentum for Evergage this year – including expanding operationsto Europe, continuing to innovate with advanced email personalization and doubling fiscal year revenues for the third consecutive year.

 

UE.co COO Taryn Lomas a Finalist for San Diego Next Top Business Leaders Under 40

UE.co‘s Chief Operating Officer, Taryn Lomas, is a finalist in the San Diego Business Journal’s “Next Top Business Leaders Under 40” awards. This event recognizes dynamic, young business leaders and role models who have significantly contributed to San Diego’s business climate and the community.

Taryn Lomas, COO of UE.co
Taryn Lomas, COO of UE.co

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Ms. Lomas co-founded UE.co in 2008. Over the past ten years, she has played a critical role in growing the company and running day-to-day operations. Under Ms. Lomas’ leadership, UE has been named San Diego Business Journal’s Fastest Growing Company, made the INC 5000 list, certified as a Great Place to Work, and won San Diego Business Journal’s Best Places to Work.

In addition to her leadership in UE.co’s operations, Taryn Lomas can also be seen championing UE.co’s Corporate Giving Initiative. Ms. Lomas has volunteered and sponsored numerous San Diegononprofits, notably The Special Olympics San Diego, Make a Wish Foundation, Monarch School, and The San Diego Humane Society, and prioritizes time monthly for UE.co team members to volunteer.

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Jason Kulpa
Jason Kulpa

“Taryn is the driving force behind the company’s operations and is responsible for fostering a culture of leadership and community responsibility,” said UE.co co-founder and CEO Jason Kulpa. “She continues to be a model for others in the organization and the community.”

“It is an honor to be named to this list with other notable leaders in the San Diego Community,” said Taryn Lomas. “Each day I partner with an innovative team that prides themselves on providing the best service for our clients and the community.”

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Vade Secure Launches the First Native, AI-Based Email Security Add-On for Office 365

Solution delivers best-in-class protection against phishing, spear phishing and malware; provides Microsoft partners with a value-added, high-margin solution for Office 365 clients

Today, Vade Secure, the global leader in predictive email defense, announced a new offering for Office 365 customers looking to enhance protection against advanced phishing, spear phishing, and malware attacks. Vade Secure for Office 365 is the only email security solution that’s fully integrated into Office 365, offering a native user experience and best-in-class filtering accuracy powered by artificial intelligence.

Value-Added Cloud Service for Microsoft Partners and MSPs
Vade Secure for Office 365 is closely aligned with Microsoft’s partner-first, cloud-first strategy. Built from the ground up with a cloud-native, API-based architecture, the new offering natively integrates with Office 365 and runs on Microsoft Azure, providing Microsoft Partners, Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs), and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with a complementary, high-margin solution for their Office 365 customers.

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Nabil Chebbi
Nabil Chebbi

“As one of the largest global Microsoft CSPs, Crayon is at the forefront of helping clients realize the benefits of Microsoft Office 365. At the same time, we recognize that Office 365’s dominant market share has made it a popular target for cybercriminals,” said Nabil Chebbi, Vice President Cloud Sales and Marketing Enablement, Crayon Group. “We’re impressed with Vade Secure’s track record of blocking advanced threats, and we’re excited to add their solution for Office 365 to our portfolio so that we can offer our clients an easy, transparent, and effective way to enhance their email protection.”

Fully API-Based for a Native Office 365 User Experience
Gartner estimates that by 2020, 50 percent of Office 365 clients will use third-party security solutions. Many traditional email security products are based on legacy gateway architectures that render certain Office 365 security features ineffective, but Vade Secure’s new, API-based solution integrates seamlessly with Office 365, allowing organizations to augment native Office 365 security features, rather than displace them.

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Specific benefits of Vade Secure’s API-based architecture include:

  • Ease of deployment: With a few clicks, admins can authorize Vade Secure to access their email flow and configure their filtering policies—no MX record changes required.
  • Native user experience: The solution is fully transparent, allowing end users to continue using the familiar Office 365 interface, without a separate quarantine.
  • Insider threat protection: Vade Secure scans internal messages sent between employees to protect against attacks originating within the organization.

Predictive Defense Powered by Artificial Intelligence
Vade Secure for Office 365 blocks advanced attacks from the first email using machine learning models that perform real-time behavioral analysis of the entire email, including any URLs and attachments. Vade Secure leverages data from more than 500 million inboxes around the world to feed its machine learning models and ensure a best-in-class catch rate.

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Specific AI and machine learning benefits include:

  • Anti-phishing: Vade Secure crawls suspicious URLs and pages in real time, following any redirections to determine whether the final page is fraudulent. The solution performs this analysis both when the message is received and any time a user clicks.
  • Anti-spear phishing: Vade Secure builds an anonymous profile that establishes employees’ normal communication patterns. Upon detecting spoofing attempts, a fully customizable banner is displayed within the email alerting the user.
  • Anti-malware and ransomware: Going beyond simply scanning attachments, machine learning algorithms perform a comprehensive analysis of the origin, content, and context of emails and their attachments to block unknown, polymorphic malware.

“Hackers are increasingly targeting Office 365 users with email-based attacks as an entry point to exploit data, files, and contacts from other Office 365 apps,” said Adrien Gendre, Chief Solution Architect, Vade Secure. “While native Office 365 security catches most spam and known threats, many organizations are strengthening their defenses with a layered approach. Vade Secure for Office 365 complements tools like Exchange Online Protection, leveraging artificial intelligence to block advanced phishing, spear phishing, and malware attacks.”

Aurea Software Appoints Former IBM Executive Dan Beer as General Manager of Aurea SMB Solutions Division and Chief Customer Success Officer

New executive brings proven business management track record and deep customer success and support experience

Aurea Software, Inc., a leading provider of customer and employee experience solutions, today announced that former IBM executive Dan Beer joined the company as chief customer success officer and senior vice president and general manager of Aurea’s newly created small and medium business solutions division, Aurea SMB Solutions.

In his new role as SVP and general manager of Aurea SMB Solutions, Beer is responsible for all operating functions of this channel-focused division, which consists of products from GFI USA, Inc., Kerio Technologies Inc., Exinda Inc. and their affiliates. Aurea SMB Solutions is dedicated to providing partners with a complementary and expanding software library of easy, cost effective and trusted software solutions in order to help them deliver immediate business value to the SMB market. With a game-changing subscription model, GFI Unlimited provides SMBs access to all the network security and communications software they need to power their business with one flat subscription fee.

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In addition, in Beer’s role of chief customer success officer across the Aurea portfolio, he is responsible for operating global customer success and support. This group is dedicated to creating a scalable, knowledge-centric success organization that delivers a reliable and consistent experience, allowing customers to optimize their use of Aurea solutions.

Scott Brighton
Scott Brighton

“Dan brings a proven track record to Aurea from leading both mid-sized and very large software companies and divisions,” said Scott Brighton, CEO of Aurea Software. “Under his leadership, I’m confident we will increase customer and partner success, deepen product innovation, build more meaningful partnerships and operate the world-class customer support operations Aurea’s clients deserve.”

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Beer brings more than 25 years of experience leading all aspects of a software business, including partner channels, corporate acquisitions, products, support, sales and services. He most recently served as chief operating officer of You.i TV, where he grew annual recurring revenue by seven times and improved operating margins by 20 percent. Prior to You.i, Beer spent more than 15 years at IBM, where he led development, sales, marketing, service delivery and support of all on-premise and SaaS products for a $450 million software solution division. Prior to that, he led the mergers and acquisitions integration team for the IBM Software Solutions Group, resulting in acquisition spend of approximately $3 billion per year and generating annual acquired revenue nearing $1 billion.

“Aurea is exceptional at putting customers’ solution adoption, retention and success at the forefront of its business model. I’m thrilled to be part of a company that continuously raises the bar on optimizing solutions and support to drive customer success,” Beer said. “I look forward to working with its exceptional teams and vast partner network to bring even more powerful software solutions to the SMB market, as well as to adopt leading-edge customer success and support models.”

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Aurea SMB Solutions offers a variety of industry-leading products, including GFI MailEssentials, GFI LanGuard, GFI EventsManager, Kerio Connect, Kerio Control and Exinda Network Orchestrator. For more information on Aurea SMB Solutions, click here.

365 Data Centers Appoints Tony Franchi Senior Vice President, Sales & Marketing

365 Data Centers, a leading provider of hybrid data center services for carrier, content and enterprise customers, continues its string of major hires with the addition of Tony Franchi as Senior Vice President, Sales & Marketing. Over the past three months, 365 Data Centers has bolstered its management team with the additions of Jeff Slapp, Vice President, Cloud Services & Support, Robert Allison, Director, Business Development, and James Ashton, Director, Network Engineering, in support of the company’s transformation from a colocation to a hybrid IT services provider.

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With extensive experience in managed services sales and building highly efficient channel partner relationships, Franchi will develop a channel partner program for the company and oversee the existing direct and carrier sales teams, and marketing initiatives. Before joining 365 Data Centers, he built an impressive track record of high level sales performance at CenturyLink, Global Capacity (now GTT), Level 3 Communications, PAETEC Communications/Windstream and DSL.net.

Bob DeSantis
Bob DeSantis

“Having repositioned 365 Data Centers in growing, edge markets with a full suite of colocation, network, IP, cloud, backup, disaster recovery and business continuity service offerings, it is the perfect time to add Tony Franchi as the leader of our sales team,” said Bob DeSantis, Chief Executive Officer of 365 Data Centers. “His proven ability to drive sales and develop long-term business relationships with customers and partners aligns with our Technology Humanizedâ„¢ approach to customer service. Since our markets, managed and cloud services, expert technical team and customer-first focus are also well suited to the partner channel, 365 will benefit immediately from Tony’s indirect sales experience and network.”

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“I’ve watched 365 Data Centers emerge as a top IT solutions provider under Bob DeSantis’ leadership and am thrilled to work with him again to further grow the company’s revenue and customer base,” said Franchi. “One of 365’s differentiators is the company’s highly-attentive, skilled and consultative sales engineering and customer service, which mirrors my own approach to working with customers and partners. This focus, coupled with 365’s portfolio of IT solutions powered by a robust network, facilitates our direct, carrier, and, soon to be rolled-out, partner channel sales initiatives.”

Franchi will replace Steve Weaver, who is leaving 365 on July 31 to pursue broader sales leadership opportunities. “Steve has provided the new 365 ownership with invaluable leadership, institutional knowledge and guidance,” DeSantis said. “We wish him the very best.”

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Data Intensity announces new Chief Sales Officer (CSO) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

Joining Data Intensity’s leadership team is Chris Vercelli (CSO) and Karl Stubellis (CFO)

Data Intensity brings on board two new members of its leadership team – a new Chief Sales Officer (CSO) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

A leading independent provider of mission-critical application services, Data Intensity is committed to becoming the next generation Managed Service Provider supporting customers in their digital transformations. Tony Sumpster, CEO of Data Intensity stated: “To support us in that journey, I am pleased to welcome Chris Vercelli and Karl Stubelis to the team. Their long industry experience is of utmost value to our organization and their contributions are going to play a major role in shaping a bright future for Data Intensity.”

Chris Vercelli
Chris Vercelli
Chris Vercelli – Chief Sales Officer

Chris Vercelli joins Data Intensity as the new CSO. Chris has held sales leadership positions within the software technology space, specifically within the areas of cloud automation, enterprise software and mobility. Most recently, Chris was CSO for Automic Software, an EQT company, with offices in Vienna, Seattle, London & Paris. Automic was acquired by CA Technologies in January 2017. Prior to Automic, Chris was with IPSoft the Intelligent Automation company, where he was super focused on new logo sales. Before that, Chris worked at BMC Software, building and developing the company’s workload automation global sales team. Chris has held sales leadership positions at BMC Software, CA Technologies Inc., Cybermation, Legato Systems & IBM Tivoli.

Upon joining Data Intensity, Chris commented, “I am very confident that the leadership team and the entire Data Intensity employee base is poised to take the next step in our evolution to be the leader in our segment of the market. The passion, and commitment from all facets of the business is very impressive.”

Karl Stubelis
Karl Stubelis
Karl Stubelis – Chief Financial Officer

Karl Stubelis joins Data Intensity as the new CFO. Paul Hausback previously acted as interim CFO, brilliantly leading the Accounting, Finance and Contract Administration teams, whilst the company searched for a long-term leader. Paul will be staying with Data Intensity for the next few months to continue to advise the teams as needed, whilst Karl settles in.

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Karl has held a variety of operational and financial leadership roles over the past 30 years, in a range of industries and in companies of all different sizes. Before joining Data Intensity, Karl served as senior vice president and CFO/COO at a SaaS-based healthcare company Arcadia, and prior to that, he was CFO of $1 billion healthcare company, athenahealth, leading all aspects of finance for this publicly-traded, multi-national company. Karl was also Vice President, Corporate Controller, and Chief Accounting Officer at global marketing and consulting firm SapientNitro Corporation.

“I am really excited to have recently joined DI. It is a fantastic company with a great story thus far, and I wanted to be part of its next chapter,” Karl remarked. “Tony and the team have positioned the company to achieve rapid growth over the next few years and I felt I needed to be part of that by both learning new things, as well as bringing my experiences to help that progression.”

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Think Next: Microsoft for Startups China Enables Chinese Innovations to “Go Global” and Overseas Innovations to “Go China”

James Chou, Managing Director and Ceo-In-Residence of Microsoft for Startups Shanghai, Reviewed the Accelerator’s Major Progress and Global Upgrading Efforts in Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Development

Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai today hosted the Think Next demo day for its third cohort of startup companies. 14 entrepreneurial teams shared their innovative achievements in areas of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, and blockchain to more than 400 co-builders of the innovation ecosystem at the event.

Shizhong Fang, mayor of the Xuhui District Government of Shanghai; Jing Chen Vice President of INESA (Group) Co., Ltd.; Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group and Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia; as well as officials from relevant government offices of the Xuhui District Government; well-known venture capital institutions and investors; and more than 40 key media representatives were in attendance.

James Chou, Managing Director and CEO-in-Residence of Microsoft for Startups Shanghai, reviewed the Accelerator’s major progress and global upgrading efforts in innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem development.

James Chou said, “We connect startups to Microsoft’s global sales engine, and bring solutions from these startups to Microsoft’s global clients, which addressed startups’ pain point in gaining clients at early stages of development and therefore accelerates their growth. Another focus of ours is to continue to develop a more comprehensive innovation ecosystem and to build a better community of developers and entrepreneurs to foster and support innovation and entrepreneurship in China. In addition, helping Chinese startup companies to enter the overseas market and enabling overseas startup companies under Microsoft ScaleUp to come to the Chinese market will be our next major goals.”

“Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing, continue to evolve, making digital transformation an important issue that no company, organization or even government can turn a blind eye to. In the face of tremendous opportunities, we will push forward digital transformation as a service (DTaaS), give full play to the technological and talent advantages of Microsoft R&D, and jointly promote upgrading in various industries with other innovative companies so that scientific innovations and commercial applications would be able to inspire each other, to drive change, and to work for the future with wisdom,” said Dr. Hon.

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Early this year, Microsoft launched a new initiative known as Microsoft for Startups that aims to accelerate the growth of startups around the world by offering co-selling options to startups, along with expanded access to Microsoft technology, increased technical and business support, and new community spaces that promote collaboration within local ecosystems. Microsoft is in a unique position to help startups reach new customers across geographies and industries with over 40,000 Microsoft sellers, hundreds of thousands of partners, and 90% of Fortune 500 customers using the Microsoft Azure. Over the next two years, Microsoft is committing USD 500 million to become the first major cloud provider to offer co-selling options to startups.

Microsoft ScaleUp (formerly known as Microsoft Accelerator) stands as a key part of the Microsoft for Startups program initiative, is designing for series A startups and offers access to sales, marketing and technical support. It also takes full responsibility for evangelizing in the developer community with Microsoft technologies to enhance innovation capabilities at each stage of the development cycle of startups to scale their business rapidly. Microsoft has acquired GitHub, the world’s leading software development community, which will help start-up developers better use GitHub and Microsoft’s technology and tools, enhance the capabilities of all phases of the development lifecycle, and enhance the impact of the global developer community.

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Microsoft ScaleUp has locations in Tel Aviv, Beijing, Bangalore, Seattle, London, Berlin, Shanghai and Sydney since 2012, forming an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. China is the only country with two locations.

As of June 2018, Microsoft ScaleUp in China has successfully accelerated the growth of 231 startup companies. Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai has successfully accelerated 43 startups with total market valuation of more than 55.6 billion RMB, including 23 companies each valuated between 100 million and 1 billion RMB, 19 between 1 and 5 billion RMB, and 1 between 5 and 10 billion RMB. For Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai Cohort 3, their total market valuation reached 17.8 billion RMB. Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai provides Cohort 3 alumni with a full-stack acceleration service. Alumni companies were given access to Microsoft Azure cloud services operated by 21Vianet, Microsoft Cognitive Services, machine learning, Cortana, and other tools. Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai has also matched opportunities for alumni companies with top companies and leading investment institutions such as SIG, IDG, Cheung Fung Capital, Jinsha River Venture Capital, Broadband Capital, and Softbank China through matchmaking events and VC Day events and other channels. Moreover, Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai provided entrepreneurial pieces of training covering management, finance, recruitment, and public relations to enhance their capabilities with executives from big names including IDEO, Apple University, PricewaterhouseCoopers, King & Wood Mallesons, Fosun Group, and ZhenFund as lecturers.

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Microsoft ScaleUp is planning to helping Chinese alumni companies “Go Global” and overseas alumni companies “Go China.”

Caicloud, a Microsoft Scale Up-Shanghai startup, successfully helped Vipshop, the third-largest e-commerce platform in China, to win overseas markets in March 2018. Recent years see an increasing number of Chinese companies marketing “Made in China” to the rest of the world through cross-border e-commerce, and Vipshop was one of them. It was once confronted by two major problems: the digital precision-marketing system, and the mix of merchandise on e-commerce platforms. So, the One Commercial Partner (OCP) recommended Caicloud to Vipshop. Riding on the back of its technological superiority in AI algorithm, Caicloud churned out a solution that met the unique business needs of Vipshop, and chose Microsoft Azure as its operating platform. This has not only satisfied Vipshop’s initial demand for higher efficiency at lower cost, but also enable the client to focus its resources on its core business. “With help from Microsoft, we got to know Caicloud, the best AI consultant in China. Caicloud provided us with very professional services and helped us rapidly through the digital transformation by thorough mining of data value,” said Zhong Wei, General Manager of Overseas and Exports Division at Vipshop.

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TapReason, an alumni company of Microsoft ScaleUp Tel Aviv, uses its real-time moment-scoring system to capture on a daily basis tens of millions of “positive moments” when most purchases are made to help its clients maximize conversion rates. TapReason is currently working with top companies across Asia, Europe, and the United States. With recommendations by Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai, TapReason brought its real-time moment-scoring system to China, and has successfully signed contracts with Vipshop.

In July 2017, Roadstar.ai, a start-up for unmanned-driving solutions, became a Cohort 2 alumni company at Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai. With full support from Microsoft ScaleUp, Roadstar.ai launched R&D centers in both Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, and completed open-road tests in the United States. It hit a record high with unmanned driving tests, including an average of one manual intervention per month in California, and several hours without manual take-over in high-complex urban road conditions. Roadstar.ai secured an A-round financing of US$128 million in May 2018, the largest amount for unmanned-driving solution developers in China. Microsoft ScaleUp Shanghai introduced many global automobile manufacturing and automobile parts companies such as BMW, Honda, ZF Group, Friedrichshafen, and Continental AG to help them to go global.

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CoinX is Coming – The First Blockchain for Consumption Promotion Network

Information Flow Between Physical Shops Is Restrictive and Most of the Merchants Do Not Orient Their Strategy According to the Customer’s Perspective

After experiencing an explosive growth in e-commerce, the global consumer market has reached somewhat of a bottleneck, as more and more people are returning to a traditional brick-and-mortar shop. In addition to physical shops being able to provide better consumer experiences, the potential volume of sales is also undoubtedly huge. However, information flow between physical shops is restrictive and most of the merchants do not orient their strategy according to the customer’s perspective.

Physical shops provide a range of vastly varying products and services, data sharing is difficult to achieve, and leads to isolated information silos. From the merchant’s point of view, although there are many channels available for advertising and promotion, the effect of promotions cannot be guaranteed, which results in a high overall cost of customer acquisition, which in turn requires more promotions, thus forming a negative feedback loop in terms of promotional difficulties.

Although centralized online payment platform are capable of connecting users, they tend to serve the big players by feeding off the merchants’ customers rather than sharing the customer traffic. Paul Lewis, who has many years of experience in sales and blockchain related sectors, proposes a truly decentralized consumer traffic sharing platform CoinX via the blockchain. CoinX can be thought as the virtual asset in the customer traffic sharing blockchain: connecting physical stores, businesses and consumers to provide effective customer resources and advertising channels for businesses; as well as cross-store consumption, reward and promotional system for customers. Since the physical store retail ecosystem has numerous participants and is rich in data & information, the blockchain technology, as large-scale consensus tool, is well suited for its operations. For example, blockchain is able to solve the problems of data storage security as well as transaction traceability.

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Using the blockchain technology, CoinX aims to integrate retail and services industries and break down the traditional barriers between stores by unifying their own coupons, reward points, loyalty cards and the stored value in an integrated referral system. The blockchain allows consumption generated via referrals to be rewarded through very accurate rebates, giving recommender substantial returns. This is a bold idea, it has never been possible to break down the consumer barriers before, all of a sudden everything is simplified. Perhaps in the future, CoinX will be able to provide services wherever there are consumption scenarios.

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CoinX founder Paul Lewis has worked as an executive and partner for a number of companies including Frontier7 and Vision4Global. He has more than 20 years of senior management experience in the sales industry, and has accrued vast industry resources in the retail sector. The customer bases covered by companies he has worked for include the United States, Sri Lanka, Australia and India.

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Co-founder Marc Aspinall has more than 18 years of experience in financial markets. He has held leading positions in top financial institutions in Europe as well as the Middle East and is responsible for cutting-edge work on trading technology and its global distribution. For 14 years he worked as the director for the foreign exchange giant CMC Markets, and in the past 4 years, he was the head of sales for the Abu Dhabi based ADS Securities. Marc has worked closely with many outstanding financial technology companies, including The Naga Group, which was listed in July 2017and successfully raised more than US$ 50 million in an ICO in December 2017.

Mi9 Retail Bolsters North America Sales and Services Leadership Teams with Industry Veterans

Mi9 Retail, a leading provider of omnichannel retail solutions, has announced the appointments of David Anderson as Vice President of North America Sales and Greg Hoffman as Vice President of Consulting for the Americas. These new hires are part of the company’s ongoing market development and service excellence strategies which also included the recent appointments of Ernie Eichenbaum and Gregg Monasteiro, as well as the acquisition of JustEnough Software earlier this year.

During his 20-year enterprise software sales career, David Anderson has become known for his ability to lead transformational change and build high-performance enterprise software sales organizations. David has held key leadership roles for fast-growing technology companies, building or rebuilding his organizations and infrastructure from the ground up. Most notably, he built successful teams for BMC Software, Symphony EYC, SumTotal Systems, JDA Software, and SSA Global. He brings a wealth of knowledge of enterprise retail, including supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, warehouse management, customer relationship management, human capital management, analytics, and more.

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Neil Moses
Neil Moses

Greg Hoffman brings more than 20 years of hands-on experience leading multi-million dollar international professional services and consulting practices. Greg has developed a strong understanding of the intricate challenges of global retail having managed businesses in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Prior to joining Mi9 Retail, Gregg Hoffman served as Vice President of Professional Services at Symphony Retail AI. Hoffman also held leadership positions over the course of his career at notable technology companies such as SumTotal Systems, Torex, and Infor.

“David and Greg add depth and experience to our management structure at a critical time in our business,” said Neil Moses, CEO of Mi9 Retail.

Neil added, “In the past four years, this company has grown tenfold and the pace of change has not abated. By bringing on strategic hires in key areas such as Sales and Professional Services, we’re expanding our ability to deliver the highest quality products and services.”

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