Match Group, which also owns dating apps OkCupid, Match.com and Plenty of Fish, reported a profit of $99.74 million for the quarter ended March 31, compared with a profit of $20.05 million a year earlier. Analysts had projected profit of $56 million, according to a survey by FactSet. Revenue increased to $407.37 million, from $298.76 million a year ago. Analysts had forecast $386 million in revenue. Revenue at Tinder increased more than 150% compared with a year ago.

To grow market share, many cloud service providers (CSPs) are introducing specialized compute instances, which target data-intensive workloads and ease the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into enterprise business applications as a strategy to capture market share. This type of activity is expanding the high-growth cloud-as-a-service (CaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) segments. The off-premises cloud service market is expected to reach $374 billion in 2022, at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.7 percent. Innovative service offerings by CSPs are multiplying, including the introduction of blockchain technology in PaaS service offers. They are also introducing new services focused on enterprise verticals, including the following: healthcare, to aid diagnosis; energy, for oil and gas exploration; financial services, for transaction monitoring; and supply chain efficiencies in retail and government, for smart city infrastructure.

The roughly €19 billion deal would face a possibly lengthy European Union antitrust review, but if completed, would create one of the continent's biggest telecommunications operators, selling the industry's holy grail "quad-play" package: cable, internet, wireless and landline-phone service on a single bill. The Financial Times reported earlier Tuesday the two companies were nearing a deal. The deal would represent the latest in a global trend of wireless carriers acquiring cable operations, or vice versa, to offer quad-play packages. Wireless carriers need high-speed cable networks to quickly transmit data to cellular towers for 5G, the coming generation of mobile networks that promise to be fast enough to enable near-instantaneous movie downloads and innovations such as self-driving cars. Both companies have said they have engaged in various forms of merger talks with each other in recent years.

All participants will be in listen-only mode. I would now like to turn the conference over to Steve Walsh, Director of Investor Relations. A copy of the news release is available on the Investor Relations page of our website, which can be found at investors.emcins.com. The archived audio webcast will be available for replay for approximately 90 days following the earnings call. This presentation includes some forward-looking statements about our expectations for our future performance. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our comments today due to a variety of factors. Additional information about factors that could affect future results is addressed in our SEC filings, including Forms S-1, 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K.

Let's be clear about this: Musk has no statistical grounds to state categorically that autonomous systems are safer than human-driven vehicles. That conclusion might stand to reason, since human error is blamed for most vehicular deaths and injuries, but autonomous systems might create dangerous situations we can't yet anticipate. His apparent assumption that the debate is over -- "Vehicles that we're producing are capable of full autonomy," he said -- is a little scary, considering how much still needs to be learned about the functioning of fully autonomous cars, and about the interaction of autonomous systems with humans in the cockpit.

Cisco plans to acquire Accompany, a privately held company that provides AI tools for sales, for $270 million. And Cisco named Accompany CEO Amy Chang as senior vice president in charge of Cisco's collaboration technology group. Chang replaces Rowan Trollope, who is leaving effective Thursday to take a job as CEO of another company, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) said in a statement. Trollope joins Five9, a cloud contact center software vendor. Accompany provides a platform for finding new prospects, navigating sales and strengthening relationships, Cisco says.

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.