Uber’s new CEO to meet London transport boss in bid to retain license

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(Reuters) — The new chief executive of Uber will meet the head of London’s transport system next week to try to retain the license for its ride hailing service in the British capital.

Transport for London (TfL), which regulates and operates the transport network in one of the world’s richest cities, stunned the taxi-app firm last week when it said it would not renew its license after the end of September.

TfL said Uber, valued at about $70 billion and whose investors include Goldman Sachs, was unfit to operate in the capital and cited its approach to reporting serious criminal offences and background checks on drivers.

Uber said it would appeal against TfL’s ruling and improve its conduct to keep its 40,000 drivers in London on the road. It can operate during the appeal, a process that could last months.

The decision to strip Uber of its license has caused a backlash from drivers and customers in the British capital. More than 800,000 people have signed a petition against the ruling.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who is less than a month into his job, meets TfL Commissioner Mike Brown on Tuesday.

“Our new CEO is looking forward to meeting with the commissioner next week,” an Uber spokesman said. “We want to work with London to make things right.”

Uber has until Oct. 13 to appeal the decision. TfL officials would then review the appeal to decide whether to uphold or reverse the ban, a TfL spokesman said.

Uber received a boost on Thursday when Prime Minister Theresa May said “a blanket ban” was “disproportionate” but said safety concerns must be resolved. However, May has no role in deciding on the issue.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan, an opposition Labour politician who has criticized the firm in the past, backed the ruling and said it would be wrong to license Uber if its conduct threatened the safety and security of Londoners.

Khan had asked the transport regulator to meet Uber’s CEO. But Khan’s spokesman said the mayor would not meet Khosrowshahi although he welcomed Uber head’s visit to London.

Premium car service Addison Lee plans to increase driver numbers in London by up to a quarter, it said on Friday, stepping up competition in the city.

The dispute in Britain, among Uber’s most important global markets, is one of many to confront the new chief executive, who has been brought in to try to clean up the company’s reputation as aggressive and unapologetic, following a string of scandals.

The company has faced regulatory and legal setbacks around the world, and been forced to quit several countries including Denmark and Hungary, amid opposition from traditional taxi services and concern among some regulators.

Khosrowshahi has already apologized to Londoners for Uber’s mistakes, marking a break with the firm’s usual combative tone.

(Reporting by Kate Holton, Editing by Paul Sandle and Edmund Blair)

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Sennheiser’s GSX 1000 gaming amp is packed with power and features

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I bet your PC’s audio setup is wack. Maybe you have a USB headset, a cheap speaker set, or a nice pair of headphones plugged into a motherboard. All of those devices work, but you can and should do a lot better. I know that because I’ve used the Sennheiser GSX 1000 audio amplifier, and it is like upgrading from SD to HD but for your headphones.

The Sennheiser GSX 1000 is an external USB amplifier designed specifically for gaming. It features a 7.1 virtual-surround algorithm built to work with gaming audio, and it has a number of preset modes for esports or cinematic gaming. It’s available now for $230, which makes it a bit more expensive than competing products from Creative Sound BlasterX like the AE-5 sound card ($150). But its extra features and external design may justify the cost for many.

What you’ll like

Incredible sound

If you’re looking for a single device to upgrade your PC’s audio, the Sennheiser GSX 1000 can make a major difference. The key is the built-in binaural amplifier that processes the sound for each stereo channel separately. Each ear gets more attention and more power than in a comparable monoaural amp.

The result of that amplification is that just about any set of analog headphones is going to sound beefier than if they’re plugged into a smartphone or even some of the more expensive PC motherboards. Your headphones will, of course, make a big difference here, but even the cheapest, crappiest earbuds sound better through the GSX 1000. If you spend more to get higher-quality headphones with impedance above 80 ohms, the amp will deliver even better audio.

Going from motherboard audio to the GSX 1000 is not a subtle jump in quality. Even the most tone deaf among us will notice the deeper, louder bass and the rich distinction between each ambient sound in an open-world game. It is absolutely like going from standard-definition video to HD but for your ears.

The GSX 1000’s 7.1 virtual surround-sound algorithm is also better than most other virtual surround options I’ve heard. Sennheiser built it specifically for gamers, and that shows in the way it handles positional gunfire. Weapons create loud bursts that have a strong sense of presence in 3D space. If you want an even better understanding of the source of fire, you can turn on the esports setting. That sacrifices realism and dampens some of the audio clutter that you’d get otherwise.

Standout, compact style

The GSX 1000 is pretty. It’s a small box that plugs into your PC over the provided red USB cable, and it has bold silver and red accents on a black body. On the top, you’ll find the large silver volume wheel. Adjusting that knob will change the digital volume display on the large LED touch panel.

In addition to the sound level, the circular display also features a number of other controls in bright red and white. It is all striking to look at, but it’s also small enough that you can keep the GSX 1000 in a laptop bag. If you’re a road warrior who spent $2,500 on a top-of-the-line gaming notebook, the Sennheiser amp will give you powerful, portable audio to go along with your intense gaming sessions in your hotel room.

What you won’t like

Confusing interface

The GSX 1000’s biggest flaw is its interface. It is not an intuitive device, and its touch controls are prone to registering false-positive inputs. It takes some time to memorize what each button on the display does. Surround setting (2.1 or 7.1) and the equalizer (esports, music, cinematic, or off) are obvious enough, but I had to keep the manual handy to remember how many plus signs did what for the sidetones and environment buttons.

Above: How many plus signs to make me a better person?

Image Credit: Sennheiser

Outside of the screen, in each corner on the top of the device, you’ll find bold red lines. These enable you to save and load profiles or default settings. These are easy to hit accidentally, which can change your audio drastically in the middle of a match. I also don’t fully understand how to save a profile and whether each of those buttons is open to saving and loading. I think I can touch and hold one of these buttons to save my current profile, but it is hard to tell if saving worked.

It’s still easy to get the settings you want once you know what those are, but the interface impedes that process.

Conclusion

Sennheiser is a beloved audio brand for a reason, and the company is trying to leverage that reputation in the gaming space now. This is a good thing because it means we get devices like the GSX 1000. I think the Sound BlasterX AE-5 sounds slightly better, but it’s not a huge difference. But the GSX 1000 is external, and so it can work with your desktop or laptop at home or on the go. That may make it a better choice for people who don’t want or need a PCI sound card.

If you want an external solution, this is an easy recommendation — especially if you’re only working with motherboard or USB headset audio.

Sennheiser provided a sample unit for the purposes of this review. The GSX 1000 is available now for $230. 

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Vainglory’s esports tournaments are about more than competition

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Super Evil Megacorp’s mobile multiplayer online battle arena Vainglory has had a strong showing on mobile, particularly as an esport. A few well-known esports teams have gravitated toward it so far, such as NRG, Fnatic, Rogue, Echo Fox, and Immortals. And this past weekend, the Vainglory8 Autumn Season kicked off with eight European and North American teams battling it out for a chance to move on to the upcoming Vainglory World Championship in December.

Vainglory will also be featured alongside Blizzard’s hit card game Hearthstone at Amazon’s Mobile Masters Invitational later this year. The two are big names in the competitive mobile space, alongside Supercell’s Clash Royale, which saw the start of its own tournaments last year.

Cloud9, one of the Vainglory8 North American competitors, has already nailed down a spot in the championship after its victory at the Vainglory Summer Championship. Its captain, Gabe “Gabevizzle” Villarin, says that he thinks that mobile esports is only going to get bigger.

“I’ve been by this for more than two years now, and I really do think that mobile esports is the future,” said Villarin in a phone call with GamesBeat. “I know that PC rigs can cost around $800 to $3,000 for the top of the line. But everyone has a smartphone. It’s as simple as going into the app and playing the game.”

Ian Huston, the manager for Cloud9’s Vainglory team, agrees. He also notes that mobile games have a reputation of being “easier” or not as skill-based, which is a misconception.

“There’s a connotation that mobile games don’t involve the same mechanical skill, and people in video games really like to pride themselves on being mechanically skilled,” said Huston. “Sometimes it gets a bad reputation. But as we’ve found with Vainglory, there is an obscene amount of mechanical skills to be learned.”

Another misconception, Huston says, is that it’s simply a clone of Riot Games’s hugely popular MOBA League of Legends. Though Super Evil is working on a 5-on-5 version, Vainglory is at its core a 3-on-3 MOBA with a single lane. This is something that Huston says provokes different strategies and gameplay.

“It follows its own rules,” said Huston. “It has its own mechanics. It’s just a different game as a whole. There are things that are borrowed just because it is a MOBA. But you’re going to find all those things in MOBAs.”

Above: Cloud9 receiving its trophy at the 2017 Vainglory Summer Season Championship. From the left: Gabe Villarin, Joseph Samano, and Gabriel Villamariona.

Vainglory runs on Super Evil’s custom-built E.V.I.L. engine, which cofounder and CEO Bo Daly says enables them to push out new features and updates much more quickly than if they were dependent on third-party software. It also helps optimize for cross-platform performance.

“Our code is architected from the ground up for very low latency, very performant execution, that allows us to be server-authoritative and support players all over the world at very large scale,” said Daly. “Part of what allows us to do that is having a shared code base that’s more reliable because the things that are happening on the server more closely mirror what’s going on the device. We’re able to share code between our iOS build, our Android build, and in theory builds on any other platform that we might want to run on in the future.”

The cross-platform aspect is especially important for esports events. Unlike in PC and console tournaments, mobile events often have players use their own devices. Heini Vesander, Super Evil’s marketing director and executive producer of esports, says that they aim to support as many devices as possible so players can use devices that they’re comfortable with.

“For us, it’s very important that our players can play on the devices that they’re comfortable playing with,” said Vesander. “In Europe we still have some players who like to play on the iPhone 5, because it’s a smaller screen. They feel like they’re faster at tapping the phone. Here, we see a lot more iPad players who feel like they get a better view.”

Cloud9’s team uses two iPads and a phone. Huston says that it can be something of an “arms race” as teams try to stay cutting-edge, but a benefit of playing on mobile is that their only real concern is whether or not a venue offers reliable Wi-Fi.

“A different team, with PCs or consoles, they have to rent out a space, or there might be a set time for them to go practice at the venue,” said Huston. “We don’t have to worry about that too much. We can set our own schedule while we’re there.”

Ultimately, Daly says, the goal is long-term engagement. They’re looking to grab their fans’ attention for 10 years, something that’s unorthodox for the mobile space. Vainglory exited beta two years ago with a player base that was 1.5 million strong, Super Evil says its average engagement across daily active users is 85 minutes.

Vesander says that she thinks players will soon begin demanding better mobile gaming experiences, and that’s exactly what Daly and his cofounders are hoping to provide. They’re industry veterans, hailing from companies such as Rockstar Games, Riot, and Blizzard, and their goal is to migrate the complex type of gameplay you might find on PC to mobile. This includes longer play sessions.

“Everyone had a lot of data to look at that said three-minute games performed well,” said Daly. “But because no one had been bold enough to build a 20-minute match, there was no data suggesting we had a path to success there. It was interesting for us to be able to challenge the common wisdom there and build something fundamentally different than what we’d seen, typically, in the mobile space.”

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AI will simplify talent acquisition

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GUEST:

Recruiters vet thousands of applications and conduct hundreds of interviews each year. This process generates an absurd amount of data that can be difficult for the average human to handle. Modern recruiters are very talented, but they inevitably miss employee placements due to human error in data collection and processing.

Almost half of recruiters — 46 percent — say the most challenging part of their job is identifying the right candidates from a large applicant pool. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have the potential to change the game by radically improving applicant vetting and intelligently matching candidates with jobs.

Streamlining temp role fulfillment

Nearly all (96 percent) senior HR professionals believe that AI technology has the potential to enhance talent acquisition and retention. With AI capabilities, recruiters can be better equipped to harness massive amounts of data from résumés, skill assessments, and employment history forms to identify the best available candidate for each job placement.

AI would drastically improve applicant/job matchmaking for recruiters hiring for temporary positions. Typically, hospitality managers and recruiters have a Rolodex of prospective bartenders, bussers, waiters, dishwashers, etc. who run the gamut of front and back house staff. But who is the right candidate available at the required time to work each job? Making that determination on a large scale is nearly impossible without AI and sufficient data points around the talent pool.

To effectively leverage AI, recruiting companies must first create datasets that record candidate attributes and continuously update this data. Essentially, a data-powered profile that includes a candidate’s background could be uploaded into the system. The background would provide important details like the candidate’s skillset, preferences, location, employment history, availability, and feedback from previous temp employers.

Temp recruiters would need to assign individuals who lack extensive work history to work different jobs to develop a dataset. Ultimately, the goal would be to get as much data on individual jobs and temp employees as possible so AI could analyze the data and recommend the best candidate for a job.

These capabilities would resemble the AI technology that Netflix, Amazon, and other services currently employ. However, instead of recommending the best movie or product to purchase, the system would put forward the ideal employee for a client based on past selection history. In our case at Jitjatjo, our proprietary AI would identify and assign the best available bartender or waiter to work a shift at one of the 600+ hospitality venues we service in New York City.

Analyzing employee strengths

AI’s potential goes beyond simply matching companies with candidates. This innovative technology will enable recruiters to assess the most punctual, experienced, and well-rounded workers. It would also be capable of identifying the employees who are most apt to work on a tight turnaround. This would allow recruiters to personalize every placement based on the client’s needs.

This process is similar to how marketers leverage datasets from Google, Facebook, and Twitter to tailor their campaigns to specific consumers. Down the road, I believe we’ll start seeing more companies share this data through open APIs. This will allow recruiters to get a more in-depth analysis of their applicants. Right now, artificial intelligence is just scratching the surface of the recruiting industry.

Looking forward

We’ve seen an uptick in groundbreaking technology in the recruitment space over the past couple years. For example, FirstJob unveiled its recruitment automation bot, Mya, to automate as much as 75 percent of the recruiting process for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. Additionally, JobBot is creatively leveraging AI to assess and rank candidates, then book their interviews.

Leaning on AI and machine learning to screen candidates will leave recruiters with more time to accomplish important tasks like communicating with prospective applicants. Have you ever applied or interviewed for a job and never heard back? Over 45 percent of job applicants never hear back from an employer, which is disheartening for talented candidates and ultimately hurts companies’ reputations in the long run.

Thanks to the evolution of technology, that percentage should decrease over time. As more companies integrate machine learning into their daily processes, recruiters will have free time to make better quality hires and, at the very least, provide talented candidates with a valuable and fulfilling recruitment experience.

Tim Chatfield is the chief executive officer and cofounder of Jitjatjo, an AI-powered temporary staffing app that provides New York City’s restaurants, bars, venues, and caterers with the ability to hire on-demand workers to remedy last-minute call-outs, increased demand, and additional events.

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Chicago’s Raise gets $60 million for its gift card marketplace from PayPal and other investors

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Raise, one of Chicago’s most well-known consumer startups, announced today that it has secured a $60 million series C round, led by Accel. PayPal, New Enterprise Associates, and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round. That brings the total amount of money raised by Raise — a marketplace where consumers can buy and sell gift cards — to approximately $147 million.

Founded in 2013, Raise is most well known for its peer-to-peer transactions. But CEO and founder George Bousis says that the most growth in the business has come from working directly with brands — Raise gave retailers the ability to sell their gift cards directly on Raise’s platform a couple of years ago in order to drive up the supply of gift cards.

“We found that driving supply was difficult because there was so much demand in the marketplace, when you’re basically selling dollar bills for 90 cents or so,” says Bousis.

Today, Bousis says that approximately 60 percent of the gift cards sold on Raise come from consumers — which Raise takes a 12 percent commission on — while 40 percent comes directly from brands — which Raise takes up to a 12 percent commission on, though it varies by brand. Current retailers who use Raise’s platform include Dell, Target, Macy’s, and Best Buy.

According to Bousis, Raise will use its newest round of cash to accelerate the development of a closed mobile loop payments network — though he doesn’t have an exact date as to when that offering will be available.

Raise has built a reputation as one of Chicago’s fastest-growing startups; this year, Raise announced that it has processed more than $1 billion in gift card sales since its inception. And according to Chicago Inno, Raise went from 50 employees to more than 300 in three years. However, the company laid off 45 employees last year — its current headcount is now 200 full-time employees — in what Bousis depicts as part of Raise’s transition into more of a general payments platform.

“What we’ve learned [over the past several years] is that people are using Raise as a payment mechanism … rather than as a gifting site or a marketplace purely for gift cards,” Bousis says.

Additionally, Raise has also been inundated with complaints from consumers, who say that the gift cards they bought from Raise do not have the balance advertised. To address this, Raise extended its money back guarantee from 100 days to 365 days. Bousis also says that as Raise gets more retailers on board, he expects the number of consumer complaints to drop.

Brendan Miller, an analyst with Forrester Research, says that a significant market opportunity for Raise lies in its ability to integrate its platform into digital wallets like PayPal, Apple Wallet, and Venmo. Naturally, the participation from PayPal in Raise’s latest round raises the question of how the peer-to-peer payments platform may work with Raise in the future. Raise says that it can’t currently comment on any future product integrations it may have planned with PayPal. However, PayPal currently works with Raise competitor CardCash, allowing users to turn unwanted gift cards into cash in their PayPal balance.

As far as potential acquirers go, Miller points to Blackhawk Network — which recently acquired Portland, Maine-based CashStar.

“What we’re seeing is a lot of consolidation in the industry right now, and I think this will be a service or capability that will be nested into what some of the bigger players in the industry,” Miller says.

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Equifax announces Chief Security Officer and Chief Information Officer have left

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(Reuters) — Equifax said on Friday that it made changes in its top management as part of its review of a massive data breach, with two technology and security executives leaving the company “effective immediately.”

The credit-monitoring company announced the changes in a press release that gave its most detailed public response to date of the discovery of the data breach on July 29 and the actions it has since taken.

The statement came on a day when Equifax’s share price continued to slide following a week of relentless criticism over its response to the data breach,

Lawmakers, regulators and consumers have complained that Equifax’s response to the breach, which exposed sensitive data like Social Security numbers of up to 143 million people, had been slow, inadequate and confusing.

Equifax on Friday said that Susan Mauldin, chief security officer, and David Webb, chief information officer, were retiring.

The company named Mark Rohrwasser as interim chief information office and Russ Ayres as interim chief security officer, saying in its statement, “The personnel changes are effective immediately.”

Rohrwasser has led the company’s international IT operations, and Ayres was a vice president in the IT organization.

The company also confirmed that Mandiant, the threat intelligence arm of the cyber firm FireEye, has been brought on to help investigate the breach. It said Mandiant was brought in on Aug. 2 after Equifax’s security team initially observed “suspicious network traffic” on July 29.

The company has hired public relations companies DJE Holdings and McGinn and Company to manage its response to the hack, PR Week reported. Equifax and the two PR firms declined to comment on the report.

Equifax’s share prices has fallen by more than a third since the company disclosed the hack on Sept. 7. Shares shed 3.8 percent on Friday to close at $92.98.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has built a reputation as a fierce consumer champion, kicked off a new round of attacks on Equifax on Friday by introducing a bill along with 11 other senators to allow consumers to freeze their credit for free. A credit freeze prevents thieves from applying for a loan using another person’s information.

Warren also signaled in a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency she helped create in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, that it may require extra powers to ensure closer federal oversight of credit reporting agencies.

Warren also wrote letters to Equifax and rival credit monitoring agencies TransUnion and Experian, federal regulators and the Government Accountability Office to see if new federal legislation was needed to protect consumers.

Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen and more than 30 others in a state group investigating the breach acknowledged that Equifax has agreed to give free credit monitoring to hack victims but pressed the company to stop collecting any money to monitor or freeze credit.

“Selling a fee-based product that competes with Equifax’s own free offer of credit monitoring services to victims of Equifax’s own data breach is unfair,” Jepsen said.

Also on Friday, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate subcommittee on Social Security urged Social Security Administration to consider nullifying its contract with Equifax and consider making the company ineligible for future government contracts.

The two senators, Republican Bill Cassidy and Democrat Sherrod Brown, said they were concerned that personal information maintained by the Social Security Administration may also be at risk because the agency worked with Equifax to build its E-Authentication security platform.

Equifax has reported that for 2016, state and federal governments accounted for 5 percent of its total revenue of $3.1 billion.

400,000 Britons affected

Equifax, which disclosed the breach more than a month after it learned of it on July 29, said at the time that thieves may have stolen the personal information of 143 million Americans in one of the largest hacks ever.

The problem is not restricted to the United States.

Equifax said on Friday that data on up to 400,000 Britons was stolen in the hack because it was stored in the United States. The data included names, email addresses and telephone numbers but not street addresses or financial data, Equifax said.

Canada’s privacy commissioner said on Friday that it has launched an investigation into the data breach. Equifax is still working to determine the number of Canadians affected, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said in a statement.

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Piper raises $7.6 million to expand its DIY computer kits for children

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Piper, the company behind the Raspberry Pi-powered DIY computer building kit for kids, has raised $7.6 million in a series A round of funding led by Owl Ventures, a venture capital (VC) fund set up in 2013 with a focus on edtech startups.

It’s well understood that the kids of today will need the right skills to prosper in the world of tomorrow, which is why we have seen such an uptick in startups promising to provide general coding and computing skills. Founded out of San Francisco in 2014, Piper’s first product is a computer kit that helps kids learn about electronics and programming through the Raspberry Pi Edition of Minecraft.

Above: Piper & Minecraft

The kit itself contains many parts and components, including a Raspberry Pi computer, LCD screen, buttons, wires, buzzers, batteries, switches, and speakers.

Above: What’s in the Piper kit

 

The DIY makers market has emerged as big business in recent years, with the likes of Littlebits raising big bucks for its electronic building blocks platform that enables kids to make things by snapping parts together, rather than soldering. Elsewhere, both U.K.-based Kano and Raspberry Pi itself have blazed a trail in the DIY computer realm.

Piper has now raised more than $10 million in funding, and with its latest cash injection the company said that it plans “to build an expanded ecosystem of products” for children of all ages to develop their STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills.

But perhaps more than that, startups such as Piper encourage kids to engage with digital technology actively rather than passively. Anyone with kids will recognize the constant family battles over various screen-based technologies, be it TVs, phones, or tablets. DIY computer kits encourage engagement with technology creatively.

“The Piper computer kit transforms the typical experience kids have with technology, giving them the power to create, versus empty, passive screen time,” explained Piper cofounder and CEO Mark Pavlyukovskyy. “We’ve seen Piper kids grow in computing and engineering skills, and in their confidence to take on all kinds of challenges. Owl Ventures has a reputation for helping education technology companies scale their businesses, which makes them the perfect partner to help battle the passive screen time consumption epidemic, as we bring Piper to more kids, both in school and at home.”

Piper said that its computer kit is currently used in 750 schools globally, two-thirds of which are in the U.S. Costing $300, the kits can be bought through Piper’s own online store or the usual retailers such as Amazon.

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Uber used Greyball software to evade 16 Portland city officials

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(Reuters) – A sweeping investigation by the city of Portland, Oregon, found that Uber Technologies used a software tool to intentionally evade 16 government officials whose job it was to regulate the ride-services company, city officials said on Thursday.

When Uber began operating in Portland in December 2014, it did not have any permits, so it used a software tool it had created called Greyball to block regulators from booking rides. Uber stopped using the software after it received approval to operate its service in Portland in April 2015.

The city imposed no fines or other penalties but transportation officials have recommended that the city ramp up enforcement efforts.

“We have ensured that no attempts to evade regulators or deny service to riders” will be allowed in the future, Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman said in a statement.

Portland launched its investigation after the New York Times reported in March that Uber used Greyball to evade government officials in areas where its service had not yet been approved, such as Portland, Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries such as Australia, China, Italy and South Korea.

Greyball allowed Uber to ignore or cancel ride requests from locations near enforcement agencies and from accounts with credit cards believed to belong to government workers. The tool also allowed Uber to show that no cars were available.

Portland found that when Uber started operating in the city in December 2014, the company used Greyball to block 17 rider accounts, 16 of which belonged to government officials, and deny 29 ride requests by city transportation enforcement officers.

“In using Greyball, Uber has sullied its own reputation,” the Portland Bureau of Transportation wrote in its report.

A spokesman for Uber said the company was “pleased the investigation was closed” and “will continue working in partnership with the City of Portland.”

Following the Times story, Uber acknowledged the existence of Greyball and said it would put a stop to using the technology to target regulators.

The U.S. Department of Justice also opened a criminal investigation into Greyball, sources said in May.

Greyball is just one of a string of scandals Uber has weathered this year, including allegations of sexual harassment and a lawsuit threatening its self-driving car business.

Uber’s main U.S. rival, Lyft, also cooperated with the Portland investigation, but regulators found no evidence Lyft had engaged in similar tactics.

(Reporting by Heather Somerville in San Francisco; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Edwina Gibbs)

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Fifty Tech Companies Selected to Shine at 10th Annual Venture Atlanta

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PRESS RELEASE:

With over $2 billion in funding awarded to date, Venture Atlanta continues to be the Southeast’s leading tech investor showcase and networking event

ATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–September 14, 2017–

Venture Atlanta, the South’s premier technology innovation and investor conference, announced today the 51 companies selected to present and showcase their wares at its 10^th annual event to be held October 11-12 at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta. Through the years, Venture Atlanta has earned a reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies while helping to launch over 380 companies and secure over $2 billion in funding. This year’s event, expected to bring close to 150 funds from across the country and a sold out crowd of over 900, will also feature Mark Cuban and Ernie Garcia, the CEO of Carvana, as keynote speakers and will include the strongest and largest roster yet of early and venture-stage companies-showcasing the depth, breadth and opportunity within the region’s technology community.

“After a record number of entries this year, including companies from all over our region as well as from Washington, D.C., Florida and Virginia, we could not be more pleased with this new crop of promising technology companies,” said Christopher Maxwell, partner at Morris, Manning & Martin, a 10-year event sponsor. Maxwell is also the Venture Atlanta 2017 company selection chair. “We’re eager to work with these companies to connect them with the capital, people and resources they need to accelerate their innovation and growth.”

Since its inception, Venture Atlanta has served as a launch pad for many of today’s successful technology companies, including Acculynk (acquired by First Data), ClearLeap (acquired by IBM), CloudSherpas (acquired by Accenture), Joulex (acquired by Cisco), Kabbage, Razor Insights (acquired by Athena Health), Roadie, Rubicon, SalesLoft and Silverpop (acquired by IBM).

The following 35 companies have been chosen to present onstage at Venture Atlanta 2017:

• Aces Health
• Brytecore
• Deposco
• EVŌ
• Fattmerchant
• FIXD
• FSLogix
• Global Safety Management
• GoProcure
• Gozio Health
• Illuma Care Connections
• ImagineAir
• Intradiem
• Izenda
• Lillii RNB
• LiveSource
• MacStadium
• MMJ Labs Pain Relief
• Orderly
• Patientory
• Predikto
• Preparis
• Raw Shorts
• Saige
• ScientiaMobile
• Sideqik
• Sudu Logistics
• Surefire Local
• ThingTech
• Trust Stamp
• UnBrokerage
• VITAL4DATA
• Vizzia Technologies
• Volantio
• Zenedge

Startup Showcase

In addition to companies presenting onstage, Venture Atlanta will also for the first time include a Startup Showcase featuring 16 companies that represent the most exciting emerging technologies in the Southeast. These innovators will be highlighted with special tables at the conference to provide sneak peeks into their plans and products. The companies include:

• ATOMIZED
• Better Walk (BW Health)
• brrrº
• Carbice Corporation
• CloudFish
• DecisionIQ
• Gauge Insights
• Grubbly Farms
• LaaSer Critical Communications
• MoQuality
• OBMedical Company
• Safely
• SingleOps
• Stackfolio
• StaffWRX
• Zywie

“We’re thrilled to be the inaugural sponsor of the Venture Atlanta Startup Showcase designed to help the Southeast’s thriving technology ecosystem embrace and share big ideas for the next decade,” said Jason Ferguson, district manager of Insperity. “We’ve carefully chosen 16 exciting companies to watch, and Venture Atlanta provides the perfect gathering for them to network and build connections that will be invaluable to fueling their future growth.”

Venture Atlanta 2017 Sponsors

Venture Atlanta 2017 would not be possible without its dedicated sponsors, including Premier Partner TechSquare Labs and headline sponsors Cherry Bekaert, Cox Enterprises and DLA Piper. For a full list of the more than 75 sponsoring companies, visit the Venture Atlanta Sponsor page.

Venture Atlanta 2017 is anticipated to be another sold-out event. To register, view the conference schedule or access more information, visit http://ift.tt/1uwTpKG.

About Venture Atlanta

Venture Atlanta, Georgia’s technology innovation event, is where the region’s most promising tech companies meet the country’s top-tier investors. As the South’s largest investor showcase helping launch more than 380 companies and raise over $2 billion in funding to date, Venture Atlanta connects local entrepreneurs with local and national venture capitalists, bankers, angel investors and others in the technology ecosystem who can help them raise the capital they need to grow their businesses. The annual nonprofit event is a collaboration of three leading Georgia business organizations: Atlanta CEO Council, Metro Atlanta Chamber and the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG). For more information, visit http://ift.tt/JylDMZ. For updates, join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter, and visit our blog.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://ift.tt/2wZNh9c

Venture Atlanta
Allyson Eman, 770-298-4202
Executive Director
aeman@ventureatlanta.org
or
Carabiner Communications
Michele Cramer, 404-246-2567
mcramer@carabinercomms.com

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AI will turn PR people into superheroes within one year

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

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GUEST:

PR is critical for startups. The profession is always been one part relationship manager, one part storyteller — a sales and marketing gig rolled into one. But with billions being poured into artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning over the next 30 years, the tech PR industry is next in line for a serious AI upgrade. Every PR person who manages to surf the new AI wave will get instant superpowers, including the ability to predict the future.

Source: Data Source: Tractica and Statista.

For the scoop, I reached out to PR and marketing tools vendors and PR agencies big and small.

Here are the big takeaways:

Pay attention

According to Jeff Hardison, VP at Lytics, a customer data platform and a major player in analytics, “Machine learning is already helping marketers make more efficient use of customer data, and complementing what they’ve had for centuries: intuition and experience.”

The keyword is “complements,” not replaces, he said.

Machine learning today. Tomorrow, AI

“Two years ago or even last year the technology that could calculate and develop the algorithms weren’t as efficient or open as they are today,” said Saif Ajani, CEO of Keyhole, a hashtag analytics company that uses Google Tensor Flow to tap into the capabilities of machine learning.

“Google and Amazon have put up AI clouds dedicated to machine learning just in the past 12 to 24 months,” he said. Keyhole can now plug its huge data set for social into the AI cloud and get results for clients quickly and affordably. Our data is 80 to 90 percent accurate in predicting what is going to happen after 30 days. Within 3 days we can predict how big the trend is going to be after 30 days,” he said.

The next #DeleteUber PR nightmare can be avoided

“What brands or PR agencies fail to understand is how big a crisis is going to be,” continued Ajani. “The #boycottunited crisis started in January, and it’s now September and still happening. The challenge for PR agencies is how do you know what’s going to go massive? Within 24 or 72 hours we can actually tell you how massive a crisis is going to be in the next 30 days.”

Above: Image courtesy of Keyhole

Soon vendors will be able to combine hundreds of different factors and billions of social posts to make predictions with an incredible degree of accuracy. Once your data tells you that a crisis is going to be massive, your agency will be able to confidently put the brakes on pre-scheduled posts and respond more appropriately to the situation, unlike what happened with #deleteuber and #boycottunited.

Some PR agencies are lagging

Surprisingly, several multi-national agencies I spoke with do not currently use machine learning or AI with their clients, and they asked not to be mentioned in this story.

That’s not good news for them.

Shift Communications, however, is ahead of the curve and poised for growth.

Shift uses AI and machine learning in predictive analytics, text mining, and advanced attribution. During a recent client crisis, Shift was able to crunch more than 15,000 content-rich blogs for a medical client in just 1.5 seconds to identify insights, trends, and keywords in hopes to identify the root cause of a situation. Through the process, Shift was able to uncover an entirely different reputation issue that the client is now able to address.

None of that would have been possible without machine learning and large data sets, says Christopher Penn, Shift vice president.

“We use a blend of open source software [and] custom code, with the help of their partner, IBM Watson,” Penn said.

AI will touch everything marketing pros touch

BuzzSumo, the powerful tool that allows any user to find out what content is popular, uses machine learning in a number of ways across its various products.

“Our primary use [of machine learning] is classification of articles into topics and extracting phrases from questions to help classify the question,” said Steve Rayson, director at BuzzSumo. “A simple example is that an article may be classified as being about e-learning, even if it doesn’t mention elearning specifically.”

BuzzSumo estimates that about half of its 3,500 paying companies are PR and social media professionals involved in content production and promotion.

Rayson continued, “Machine learning works well with large data sets and helps us with problems such as classification. It also helps us to identify common elements of content that gains shares and links. … More generally, we are seeing the benefits of machine learning using large data sets such as in translations, image recognition, and spam detection.

“We have a database of over 6 billion content items and add over 100 million new content items each month. We use machine learning to help us classify content and to rank content. For example, we crawl hundreds of thousands of forums to identify questions being asked on any topic and we extract phrases to group these questions into sub-topics,” he said.

Rayson said he’s interested in “content writing algorithms” from Narrative Science and Automated Insights.

“It’s really about focusing on the problem you are trying to solve.”

For AI, size of the data matters

As a leading platform for PR media measurement and attribution analytics, AirPR crawls, processes, and analyzes billions of data points per day and uses natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques to “teach” its systems to understand text and classify articles, as well as determine relevance and influence for any brand.

“We use AI and machine learning to improve filtering of the data our customers have access to, removing the majority of spam and non-relevant URLs that distort business impact reporting,” said AirPR CEO and cofounder Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer.

AirPR’s own content marketing and PR teams leverage the machine learning capabilities of the AirPR Analyst platform to research which topics and story arcs are trending for its target audience. The platform provides deeper insight into the articles, authors, influencers, and messages that drive actual engagement with a customer’s brand.

Another company to pay attention to is Trendkite, an emerging leader in PR measurement and analytics.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning are engrained throughout the TrendKite product,” a Trendkite spokesperson told me over email. “With machine learning, Trendkite is able to provide insights and recommendations based on reviewing more data points than humans could possibly reason over. This enables us to do things like distinguishing earned media content from other types of content so that we can better attribute business outcomes to PR efforts.”

Above: Image courtesy of Trendkite

Social tools are leading the AI charge

Hootsuite sees itself as innovative in data science, which also requires a large amount of data.

Hootsuite uses machine learning for social marketing, social selling, and social support. A product to watch is Hootsuite Insight, which tracks mentions and brand sentiment.

Above: Screenshot from Hootsuite.com

“We figure out trends around your brand, which allows us to identify spikes,” said Mik Lernout, vice president of product at Hootsuite.

“Hootsuite Insights consumes a lot of data to create meaningful results for our customers. A lot of that initial work is pretty run-of-the -mill data crunching. The data science and machine learning is used when Insights classifies and prioritizes the relevant data for a specific customer. Out of all of the social conversations about my brand: Are those positive or negative? What are the topics and themes that keep coming up? What are the real-time trends you might need to act on? These kinds of questions can only really be answered using data science and machine learning,” Lernout said.

Expect more PR apps with machine learning

Above: Courtesy of Say It Media

Finally, I chatted with Audrey Mann Cronin, the founder of Say It Media, Inc., who invented the mobile app LikeSo. LikeSo is a personal speech coach that helps you eliminate annoying verbal tics. Cronin says she’ll be adding machine learning and artificial intelligence during her next round of funding.

Personally, I could see so many uses for this app by PR and especially executive communications professionals, as well as for anyone who wanted to improve their speaking ability. The app is included in the next syllabus at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill by communications professor Rick Clancy.

So pay attention, PR veterans.

The next wave of PR tech is here, and hunches and experience aren’t going to cut it anymore. Will robots take over PR jobs? According to Willrobotstakemyjob, there’s only an 18 percent likelihood of that ever happening.

Aaron Cohen (@cohencomms) is an award-winning writer, consultant and tech evangelist based out of Portland, Oregon. He is the founder of Glitch PR, a one-person powerhouse helping tech-forward startups think different about all things PR.

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How blockchain will finally convert you: Control over your own data

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

GUEST: In the past few years, blockchain has developed an unrivaled reputation as the next big thing for the decentralized internet. Startups have absorbed billions of dollars from traditional funding and token sales to develop software and proof-of-concepts that employ blockchain to fix many of the problems that riddle centralized online services. But will blockchain tech 

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