This call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Verisk's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Lee Shavel. Mr. Shavel, please go ahead. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our first quarter of 2018 financial results. With me on the call this morning are Scott Stephenson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Anquillare, Chief Operating Officer. Following comments by Scott, Mark and myself, highlighting some key points about our financial performance, we will open the call for your questions. The earnings release referenced on this call as well as the associated 10-Q can be found in the Investors section of our website, verisk.com. The earnings release has also been attached to an 8-K that we have furnished to the SEC. We also filed an 8-K on April 26, 2018, with a description of our business segment recasting. A replay of this call will be available for 30 days on our website and by dial-in. Finally, as set forth in more detail in today's earnings release, I will remind everyone that today's call may include forward-looking statements about Verisk's future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from what is suggested by our comments today. Information about the factors that could affect future performance is contained in our recent SEC filings. Now, I will turn the call over to Scott Stephenson. The first quarter was another example of our team achieving a high level of organic revenue growth, which remains the most important measure of our vitality as an organization. This growth was a product of our traditional multilevel growth plan including, first, the development of new customers for existing solutions, such as was seen in our claims analytics platform; secondly, the cross-selling of our existing solutions to existing customers as seen in our imagery solutions and upstream oil and gas analytics; and thirdly, new products including insurance data hosting. Over the last 90 days, I was particularly impressed by the quality of our engagement with many large leading customers resulting in real-time business wins and opportunities into the future. We continue to enjoy visits from the most senior leaders at some of our biggest customers who are looking to get closer to our pipeline of innovations. We held the largest gathering in our history for customers of our catastrophe analytics solutions and we're impressed again with the level of engagement and input from our clients.

When trying to figure out what to do after an extensive career at Google, Motorola, and Flipkart, Punit Soni decided to spend a lot of time sitting in doctors' offices to figure out what to do next. It was there that Soni said he figured out one of the most annoying pain points for doctors in any office: writing down notes and documentation. That's why he decided to start Suki -- previously Robin AI -- to create a way for doctors to simply start talking aloud to take notes when working with patients, rather than having to put everything into a medical record system, or even writing those notes down by hand. That seemed like the lowest hanging fruit, offering an opportunity to make it easier for doctors that see dozens of patients to make their lives significantly easier, he said. "We decided we had found a powerful constituency who were burning out because of just documentation," Soni said.

The future of artificial intelligence (AI), the technology that is seen as potentially impacting almost every industry on the planet, is widely acknowledged to be a war between tech firms in America and China. In a notable side-note to that battle, China now has the world's highest-valued AI startup after SenseTime, a company founded in 2014, announced a $600 million Series C investment round. A source with knowledge of discussions told TechCrunch that the round values the company at over $4.5 billion, while it is also raising an extension to this round. That marks a hefty increase on the company's most recent $1.5 billion valuation when it raised a $410 million Series B last year. SenseTime CEO Li Xu said the company plans to use the capital to expand its presence overseas and "widen the scope for more industrial application of AI." Beyond the high figures involved -- the round is a record fundraising for an AI company worldwide -- SenseTime's investment efforts are notable because of the names that have backed it.

In today's era of information-based competition, banking executives are increasingly looking towards big data to maintain their competitive edge. In the retail banking area, there has been weak recovery following the 2008 financial crisis. General market growth has been modest, while the low interest-rate environment and new online market entrants have further compressed margins. It was always important to retain and expand existing customer relationships. But now it is critical.

Microsoft has reported strong Q3 results that beat analyst expectations, with revenues of $26.8 billion, up 16 percent year on year, or 13 percent in constant currency. Productivity and business processes revenues were up 14 percent at $9 billion; Office 365 commercial products and cloud services revenue grew 12 percent overall; Intelligent Cloud revenues hit $7.9 billion, up 15 percent year on year, while Azure revenues saw growth of 93 percent – having logged over over 90 percent growth for ten consecutive quarters. CEO Satya Nadella hailed the results, and suggested that AI, intelligence, edge computing, and the IoT stand at the core of the company's repositioning in recent years – which has taken place under his leadership. "It was another strong quarter, the result of picking the right secular trends," he said. "The intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge era is already upon us. It represents a tremendous opportunity. We took significant steps this quarter to put this at the forefront of everything we do, realigning our entire engineering organisation to accelerate innovation and better serve the needs of customers and partners."

On March 1, 2018, the Company acquired processing prepaid platform, servers, POS terminals, customer list, a processing software program from ECS Prepaid LLC. The core asset of ECS is its processing software program, which Gopher intends to marry immediately into the prior acquisition of the UGO HUB and the UGO brand of products. ECS PrePaid's core operating system currently operates over 9,000 terminals in retail locations throughout the United States. These terminals process over 14,000 transactions a day and have capacity to entertain at least three times its current volume, without further software expense. This platform generated approximately $32 million in revenue for the year ended December 31, 2017 (unaudited), approximately $4.2 million for the month of January 2018 (unaudited) and approximately $4.3 for the month of February 2018 (unaudited).

Deep ocean robotics is not generally an area where we expect to see much in the way of significant innovation. When we do write about submersible robots, they're usually confined to very near-surface operations. This isn't a total surprise: It seems like the only people who really worry about what's going on in the deep ocean (meaning hundreds or thousands of meters beneath the surface) are the military, the occasional scientist, and the oil and gas industry. Robots are important to these folks, even critical in some cases, but the technology has been more or less stagnant for decades, which is why we don't write about it very frequently. To be fair, there are some very good reasons why it's hard to innovate when it comes to submersible robotics.

Google parent company Alphabet reported first quarter earnings for 2018 today, beating Wall Street estimates on sales and profit thanks in large part to its mammoth search advertising machine that continues to grow year after year. But one interesting highlight from the earnings announcement was just how much money the company's smart home company Nest earns in revenue and reports in losses. Because Nest was rolled back into Google proper earlier this year, Alphabet recast its quarterly earnings figures for 2017 to account for the fact that Nest revenues and losses would be moved from the "Other Bets" section of Alphabet's business to the standard Google revenue line item. Comparing the differences in quarterly revenues and operating income, we can see that Nest made about $726 million in revenue, yet it ultimately contributed a $621 million loss to the "Other Bets" section throughout the year. In other words, Google spent more than half a billion dollars last year to establish Nest in sectors like security cameras, alarm systems, and video doorbells.

The S&P 500 tech sector, up 1.8% in 2018, is still among the best-performing groups in the broader index. But more than a third of the 69 stocks in the sector have declined in 2018, the most for any full year since 2011. In 2017, only six of them had lost ground. The divisions are likely to come into sharper focus as more tech-focused companies report financial results in the coming days. With valuations already stretched by traditional measures, investors are contemplating which companies warrant the higher multiples that typically come with the tech label.

YouTube parent company Google on Monday released what it said would be the first quarterly report outlining efforts to enforce its community guidelines. The report, which looked at the last quarter of 2017, said that it removed eight million videos from YouTube during the quarter, adding that the videos it removed "were mostly spam or people attempting to upload adult content." Of note, however, is that YouTube's machine-learning algorithm spotted the overwhelming majority of the content. During the company's quarterly earnings call Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that "over six million videos removed in Q4 were first flagged by our machine systems, and over 75% of those videos were removed before receiving a single view." The company introduced its machine flagging in June, 2017.