NEW YORK The founder of former telecommunications company Global Crossing Inc, Gary Winnick, has acquired a majority stake in live streaming concert service Qello - the first step in creating a new company and technology platform to capitalize on the surge in online TV consumption, Winnick told Reuters.

Most organizations today aspire to use predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to influence customer behavior and improve business performance. Unfortunately, the process for becoming a "predictive organization" is broken from both a technical and an organizational standpoint. It requires "Unicorns:" Well trained, expensive, rare data scientists and PhDs who are hard to hire and retain. Those teams then invest roughly six months on average cleaning data and building machine learning models, and then have to maintain those models as they degrade over time. Whenever products and consumer behavior change, the models break and need to be re-written.

LoopMe, a digital advertising firm that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize mobile video advertising, has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Impulse VC and Harbert European Growth Capital, with participation from Holzbrinck Ventures and Open Ocean Capital. Founded out of London in 2012, LoopMe unifies all the popular mobile video ad formats, covering pre-roll, HTML5, and the VAST ad-serving standard. In a nutshell, the platform replaces humans with algorithms that determine the placement of ads in real time, based on metrics such as purchase intent or offline sales. The technology "learns" how viewers are reacting to the ads and changes them based on how a user is responding. The company's platform has been used by a host of well-known brands, including Microsoft, Disney, Airbnb, and Honda.

Bloq, a provider of blockchain technology solutions for global enterprises, announced that it has acquired Skry (formerly Coinalytics), a pioneer in blockchain analytics, to accelerate the development of its analytics capabilities and open the door for Artificial Intelligence (AI) on its platform. With the acquisition, Bloq wants to enhance its suite of analysis tools and position itself to maximize the value of blockchain data sets through AI and machine learning. The Chicago-based company focuses on solving key business issues surrounding security, provenance, authentication and reconciliation. The new acquisition, whose detailed terms haven't been disclosed, includes Skry's intellectual property and team, which seems a perfect fit for Bloq's focus on empowering better visibility and decision-making in a multi-blockchain, multi-network world. "Financial institutions will need a full suite of tools to take blockchain [technology]'s role from high-tech database to business-driver," Bloq's Co-Founder and Chairman Matthew Roszak explained to Bitcoin Magazine.

Amper, a startup that offers AI-powered music composition, is announcing that it has raised $4 million in funding. The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Foundry Group, Kiwi Venture Partners and Advancit Capital. Amper previously raised funding from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. You might not expect a film composer like Drew Silverstein (who founded the company with Sam Estes and Michael Hobe) to create a product that is ostensibly competes with his own work, but Silverstein doesn't see that way. Instead, he pitched Amper as a fast, affordable and royalty-free way to create the music for more "functional" projects (like commercials a or short online videos), where most companies would currently use pre-written stock music.

By transforming their networks and operations with the newest technologies, mobile operators could double their cash-flow conversion within five years. The past several years have been tough for telecom companies. Their revenue and cash flows1 1. Cash flow is measured here in terms of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) minus capital expenditures. Consumption of mobile data boomed, as masses of new wireless customers used their handsets to spend ever-increasing amounts of time online. Companies responded by investing heavily in their wireless networks, even as subscriber growth slowed. As a result, the average ratio of capital spending to revenues has remained stubbornly high, at around 15 percent, for the major players (Exhibit 1).

Lily Robotics, which promised an autonomous flying camera, is shutting down operations. Lily Robotics, the hyped drone startup that shutdown last month amid a consumer-protection civil suit from the San Francisco District Attorney's office, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday. In documents submitted to a U.S. district court in Delaware, Lily Robotics outlined its intentions to auction off intellectual property and refund customers, which it said was its first priority. "[Lily] wants to ensure no customers are harmed in this process," wrote Curtis Solsvig, a managing director at Goldin Associates who is named as the company's chief restructuring officer. Lily amassed more than $38 million in pre-orders from 61,450 customers in more than 80 countries, according to the filing.

Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking the weather on Google Home or Amazon Echo. Battery Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Salesforce Ventures and a number of angels joined together to finance a $5.5 million seed investment in the startup. Workfit's announcement is underscored by a general uptick in activity around conversational AI for enterprise. Amazon's Alexa, perhaps the most enterprise-friendly of the popular conversational tools available today, boasts integrations with companies like Hipchat and Sisense for both team collaboration and data recall. Of course, the reality is that most meetings are not limited to a single conference room and even fewer have an Echo listening in.

The 2017 Benzinga Global Fintech Awards is a competition to showcase the companies with the most impressive technology that are paving the future in financial services and capital markets. I Know First: I Know First's self-learning forecasting algorithm utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to find relationships and patterns in large sets of historical stock market data in order to analyze and predict behavior and identify the best daily market opportunities. I Know First: On the institutional side, our typical clients are family offices, hedge funds and other asset management firms, as well as banks. He succeeded by applying a wide range of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, including neural networks and genetic algorithms. We have structured a tiered product offering, which consists of algorithmically generated forecast reports (standardized or tailored to client's needs) and development of systematic trading and allocation strategies for hedge and mutual funds as well as structuring of smart-beta or actively managed ETFs and other investment vehicles.

OK, here we go again. A couple of days ago, Square reported the results of its Q4 and full year 2016 business results. The results and attendant guidance can be broadly characterized as another quarter of beat and raise. Interestingly to me, was that the raise part was more on earnings. The company is now forecasting growth of 30% in adjusted revenues but it expects adjusted EBITDA to more than double in 2017. Over the past year that I have been following the name, I have been particularly impressed with the company's strategy of being able to offer lots of pieces of IT services that merchants needed in order to be successful. The shares jumped 21% last week and have reached an all-time high since the company went public in late 2015.