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This section of SportTechie, SportTechie Wire, contains original press releases issued by various companies and industry organizations. The releases are reviewed by the SportTechie editorial staff to ensure relevancy to the sports technology industry. For information and access, send your name and email address to [emailprotected]

KORE Software will soon be hosting their quarterly Customer Insights Webinar; Augusts event features Chris Zeppenfeld of the Charlotte Hornets

New York, NY, June 1, 2017 Today KORE Software announced their third quarter Customer Insights Webinar, entitled Driving CRM Adoption Through Effective User Training, which will take place on Tuesday, August 22nd at 12:00 pm ET. Chris Zeppenfeld, Vice President of Business Intelligence at the Charlotte Hornets, will be the featured speaker. During this special one-time event, Zeppenfeld will be sharing how he uses training to address one of the industrys most frequent challenges driving user adoption.

Zeppenfeld believes that when it comes to poor CRM adoption, there is a smoking gun, namely, user training issues. During his 60-minute presentation, Chris will take listeners through various tips and tricks to maximize the effectiveness of CRM training programs, drive user adoption, and elevate the CRM game.

Zeppenfeld is currently in his eighth season with the Charlotte Hornets/Hornets Sports and Entertainment. As the VP of Business Intelligence, he is responsible for Analytics, CRM, Data Warehouse, Surveys, Ticket Pricing, Revenue Strategy and Email Marketing. Prior to his role at the Hornets, he served as Senior Manager of Client Services at TeamWork Online, working with clients including the NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS, and NHL.

Zeppenfeld previously presented the same information that will be in the KORE webinar at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference earlier this year. He received astounding feedback from this presentation. As Zeppenfeld is a longtime KORE Software customer, KORE asked Zeppenfeld to recreate his popular presentation for their Customer Insights Webinar Series, which is available to the public.

Each quarter, KORE Software hosts a Customer Insights Webinar, featuring customers who have valuable information to share with the industry. The content focuses on peer-to-peer sharing of best practices, tips, and experiences in the world of sports and entertainment business intelligence, sponsorship, and fan engagement.

Register for the upcoming August 22nd webinar through this link: http://info.koresoftware.com/ensuring-crm-adoption-through-effective-user-training.

About KORE Software:

KORE is the global leader in sports and entertainment business management solutions. Comprised of KORE Software, KORE Software Capital LLC, and KPI (KORE Planning and Insights), KORE serves more than 100 major league teams and 200 collegiate customers worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer information including their preferences and behaviors, creating valuable insights, and helping teams follow up with powerful action. For more information about KORE Software and KPI, visit http://www.koresoftware.com.

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Free Open Webinar: Driving CRM Adoption Through Effective User Training - SportTechie

NEW YORK, August 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

If you want a Stock Review on ORCL, RHT, TWLO, or ZEN then come over to http://dailystocktracker.com/register/ and sign up for your free customized report today. IT spending, technological innovations, and economic growth impact the Application Software industry dynamics significantly. This space is a consolidated one that consists of ERP, CRM, SCM, and business intelligence, and analytics. For today, DailyStockTracker.com takes notice of Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL), Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), Twilio Inc. (NYSE: TWLO), and Zendesk Inc. (NYSE: ZEN). Learn more about these stocks by downloading their comprehensive and free reports from DailyStockTracker.com member's area at:

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Oracle

California headquartered Oracle Corp.'s shares finished Friday's session 0.29% higher at $48.24. A total volume of 11.70 million shares was traded. The stock has gained 7.01% over the previous three months and 25.46% on an YTD basis. The Company's shares are trading above their 200-day moving average by 10.85%. Moreover, shares of Oracle, which develops, manufactures, markets, sells, hosts, and supports application, platform, and infrastructure technologies for information technology environments worldwide, have a Relative Strength Index (RSI) of 40.63.

On August 08th, 2017, Oracle announced the worldwide release of itsOracle Banking Paymentssolution. The offering was built from the ground up, leveraging ISO 20022 and is designed to help banks compartmentalize payments messaging, message transformation, and payment processing while providing high fidelity insight. Using the Oracle Banking Payments API, banks can also innovate within the Internet of Payments, collaboration with third parties or curate new business models in collaboration with Fintechs. ORCL complete research report is just a click away at:

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Red Hat

Shares in North Carolina headquartered Red Hat Inc. ended the day 2.49% higher at $98.34. A total volume of 1.72 million shares was traded, which was above their three months average volume of 1.57 million shares. The stock has advanced 0.58% in the last month, 11.43% in the previous three months, and 41.09% since the start of this year. The Company's shares are trading 2.69% and 16.30% above their 50-day and 200-day moving averages, respectively. Moreover, shares of Red Hat, which provides open source software solutions to develop and offer operating system, virtualization, management, middleware, cloud, mobile, and storage technologies to various enterprises worldwide, have an RSI of 54.75.

On July 31st, 2017, Red Hat announced that it has acquired the assets and technology of Permabit Technology Corporation, a provider of software for data deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning. With the addition of the latter's data deduplication and compression capabilities to the world's leading enterprise Linux platform - Red Hat Enterprise Linux- the Company will be able to better enable enterprise digital transformation through more efficient storage options. The complimentary report on RHT can be downloaded at:

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Twilio

California headquartered Twilio Inc.'s stock rose 3.63%, closing the session at $31.38. A total volume of 3.41 million shares was traded, which was above their three months average volume of 2.41 million shares. The Company's shares have gained 6.45% in the last one month, 30.75% in the previous three months, and 8.77% on an YTD basis. The stock is trading 9.50% above its 50-day moving average and 5.00% above its 200-day moving average. Additionally, shares of Twilio, which provides cloud communications platform that enables developers to build, scale, and operate communications within software applications through the cloud as a pay-as-you-go service, have an RSI of 56.71.

On July 17th, 2017, Twilio announced Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle, as the newest member of the Company's Board of Directors. Mr. Epstein has more than 20 years' experience in financial leadership at both private and public companies, and currently specializes in operational strategy for marketplace, B2B cloud software, and advertising technology companies.

On August 08th, 2017, research firm Canaccord Genuity reiterated its 'Buy' rating on the Company's stock with an increase of the target price from $32 a share to $38 a share. Sign up for your complimentary research report on TWLO at:

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Zendesk

On Friday, shares in California headquartered Zendesk Inc. finished the session 3.18% higher at $26.29. A total volume of 993,160 shares was traded. The stock has gained 24.01% on an YTD basis. The Company's shares are trading above their 200-day moving average by 1.11%. Moreover, shares of Zendesk, which provides software-as-a-service products for organizations, have an RSI of 39.67.

On August 08th, 2017, Zendesk announced that Chief Revenue Officer Bryan Cox has resigned, effective September 15th, 2017, to pursue an opportunity in the venture capital industry. Mr. Cox has agreed to remain at the Company until the date of his resignation to assist in the transition of his responsibilities. Get free access to your research report on ZEN at:

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Technical Reports on Application Software Equities -- Oracle, Red Hat, Twilio, and Zendesk - Markets Insider

You're reading Entrepreneur Middle East, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Be it to get a ride to work, or to indulge our food cravings, technology seems to be propelling most aspects of our lives today, and so, it shouldnt come as a surprise that this kind of disruption is hitting the beauty and wellness industries too. Consider Shedul, a booking and scheduling platform for salons, spas, and other wellness businesses, the brainchild of entrepreneurs William Zeqiri and Nick Miller. We did some research and found out that the majority of businesses in the beauty industry operate offline, without any software at all. 52% of salons in the US still manage their bookings with pen and paper, says cofounder and CEO Zeqiri.

Looking to change that, in 2015, the duo launched Shedul, which Zeqiri declares to be the worlds first subscription-free platform. The cloud-based software is accessible via an internet connection on any device, with most users found to be accessing the platform on their mobiles. Besides taking the hassle out of operations management for salons by automating key processes such as appointment bookings, customer records, inventory, financial reporting and other tasks, this platform is also addressing a key challenge for the industry- that of resource utilization. The main pain point is the inefficient utilization of appointment schedules, which is causing low occupancy rates for businesses and loss of revenue, says co-founder and COO Miller. Our technology is helping businesses optimize their schedule with real-time online availability, and in some cases, it has increased user revenue more than 30%.

Sheduls software enables salons, spas, and other wellness businesses schedule appointments, reduce no-shows with the help of automated reminders, and undertake point-of-sale activities among other tasks. The entrepreneur says given the status of occupancy rates in the beauty and wellness industry, and with industry players losing billions of dollars [due to occupancy issues], Sheduls technology helps connect small businesses directly to demand. However, the biggest credit for Sheduls growth trajectory (the portal claims over 40,000 merchant sign-ups in more than 120 countries, in under two years) should go to its free-to-use model. Our monetization strategy is to charge a small commission fee per booking on our soon-to-be-launched consumer marketplace, and keeping the main SaaS [Software as a Service] tool free, says Zeqiri, explaining the startups aggressive user acquisition strategy while keeping an eye on revenue.

Related: UAE Startup Joi Wants To Be The Go-To Portal For All Things Gifts

Its also this growth (which the founders consider almost entirely organic through word-of-mouth) that helped the startup close a US$6 million round of Series A financing, backed by both MENA and Silicon Valley investors in June 2017. Led by Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP), and backed by Dubais BECO Capital and San Francisco-based Lumia Capital (a VC firm that backs the Middle East ride-hailing app Careem, among many other startups), the new round of funding also follows an earlier seed round (also led by MEVP) in October 2016. Without going into the details, the entrepreneurs say they plan to use the funds to expand their product development and engineering teams to support the roll out of some new features of their platform.

Shedul's scheduling platform. Image credit: Shedul.

The founders feeling of triumph is apparent as Zeqiri notes that they had aimed for the best VCs in the region, and so managing to seal a deal with them was definitely music to their ears. Its critical to align on the big picture or vision with VCs, before getting into the detailed analysis [of the deal]. Being a global company, we got lots of interest from international VCs, and are proud to have San Francisco-based Lumia Capital joining the round, he says. The investors too are upbeat about the startup and its product, with MEVPs managing partner Walid Mansour noting in a statement that Shedul is a truly global success story, [as] the growth they achieved in two years is remarkable. Chris Rogers, partner at Lumia Capital noted that Shedul has made best-in-class software accessible to the massive beauty industry, which still largely operates offline.

While the company notes that millions of bookings are made through the platform each month growing at an average rate of 35% month-on-month, its significant (and also intriguing) to note that almost half of this Dubai-based startups users are in the US (40%), followed by the UK (15%), Australia (11%), and Canada (7%). The MENA market, where they have about 2,000 salons and spas using their platform till date, is hence still a growing geography for the tech startup and represents about 5% of their total user base (with more than half in the UAE). We are a global business with most users internationally, and we just happen to start the business in Dubai Our story is that we are serving the globe out of Dubai, rather than targeting the local market, explains Zeqiri.

The entrepreneurs lofty ambitions for their scheduling platform is to process over $1.5 billion worth of appointment bookings by the end of 2017, and they believe they are on track to achieve this. Word-of-mouth factor is strong, our users are the best ambassadors spreading the word within their own community, says Miller. We have a solid 5/5 user rating on Capterra.com [a platform that helps businesses find the right software for their operational needs], and believe that if users require training on how to use our system, we have not done a good job building it. In line with this belief, the team finds that merchants adopting Shedul often rave about its easy setup and intuitive interface, as well as its personable customer support.

Related: From Concept To Launch: The Origin Story Of My Middle East Startup

The founders are also grateful for the vocal backing they get from their partners, which, they believe, has a key role to play in their software becoming a familiar name in the global beauty and wellness industry. Moreover, from not even being in the reckoning just over a year ago, Shedul has also managed to bag top slots in Capterras independent review reports for 2017s Top 20 Salon Management software under the categories of Most Popular, Most User-Friendly and Most Affordable software. With netizens the world over more confident than ever to book and pay for local services online, SaaS products are in fact already a norm when it comes to food delivery, transportation, and other basic services, and the entrepreneur duo behind Shedul are confident that the beauty and wellness space is also making the transition at a positive pace. Interestingly, in a bid to prevent users from leaving its apps, tech titan Google too launched Reserve with Google in July 2017- a feature (in the US) that lets users book health and wellness appointments directly from its Search or Maps apps via a book button. Such enormous competition notwithstanding, Shedul has its eyes set to help businesses in the salon and spa industry thrive- and armed as it is with a business model tailored to take advantage of the SaaS boom, as well as a passionate and ambitious team, the company seems to be well on its way to realizing its goals.

INVESTOR VIEWPOINT Amir Farha, co-founder and Managing Partner, BECO Capital

Why did BECO Capital decide to get on board as investors- what impressed you about Shedul? The management team at Shedul is extraordinary. They are second-time entrepreneurs who have a long working relationship, and have clearly demonstrated superior execution capabilities. Given the relatively short life of the company, the product they have built is outstanding, relative to others in the market with rave reviews from a sticky customer base. Furthermore, we love their vision and ambition. Will and Nick are looking to build something truly transformational that will disrupt the spa industry globally. We are honored to be part of their journey and will do our best to help them succeed.

Do you see Shedul evolving as a profitable business with their free-software model? Financially, what excites BECO Capital in the deal? Every business needs to find a revenue stream that scales, and Shedul has plans to do that. At the moment, their focus is purely on product, experience and ensuring their customers are happy. Once they have achieved scale and high retention, they will be able to monetize through various business models. They already process tens of millions of dollars in bookings per month, and they are looking to launch a marketplace, which should capture some of those dollars. If they can execute on that plan, the potential revenue scale is enormous, not-tomention, the ancillary revenues that can exist in the future.

'TREP TALK William Zeqiri, co-founder and CEO, Shedul

William Zeqiri,co-founder and CEO, Shedul. Source: Shedul

Based on your current fundraising experience, what would be your top three tips for the regions startups to pitch and clinch funding for their ventures? [First], solve a real-world problem with an innovative product. [Second], demonstrate traction and growth with users. [Third], articulate a clear monetization strategy. Before approaching any investors it is important to build and operate a working product that has real customers using it, to show a trend of at least three months of strong growth and traction, and to be meticulous with your unit economics, P&L reporting, and burn rate.

More:
Conquering The Globe: Shedul Co-Founders William Zeqiri and Nick Miller - Entrepreneur

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BY: Joseph Bottum August 12, 2017 5:00 am

World War III has started, and almost no one seems to have noticed. Or perhaps the Cold War is a better analogy, if the Cold War had 20 sides fighting each other all at once and, again, if almost no one was paying enough attention to realize what is going on.

At least, this is what Alexander Klimburg insists in The Darkening Web, his new book on the battles of cyberspace. It's a quiet war, in the sense that few have died thus far, but it has the potential to be murderous, and every year raises the stakes of that war. The Chinese may be the world's leading players, but in November 2014, North Korea raised its status by stealing and posting publicly confidential information from the Sony corporation, and then erasing Sony's computersall in revenge for a minor comedy film mocking Kim Jong Un.

And then, of course, there are the Russians, both on the level of government and the level of individual criminals. In December 2015, during the Russian Army's push into Ukraine, Klimburg points out, "Ukraine became the first country to suffer a verified large-scale cyber attack on its critical infrastructure. Over 225,000 Ukrainians lost their light and heating in the middle of winter when a cyberattack disabled part of the country's power grid."

Meanwhile, we have hackers for money and hackers for mischief and even hackers on a mission, conducting distributed-denial-of-service attacks and information thefts in the name of one ideology or another. This spring, 16 hospitals in Great Britain were shut down by the WannaCry ransomware virus, which locked patients' computerized records until a small ransom had been paid to a bitcoin account. Similar attacks occurred across Europe and in the United States.

The United States has committed its share of these attacks. In 2009, the centrifuges Iran was using to enrich uranium were sabotaged with the Stuxnet virus, which is now generally agreed to have been a joint American-Israeli exploit. As far as that goes, the United States conducted the first massively successful international hack all the way back in 1981. The CIA learned from its KGB double agent Vladimir Vetrov that the Soviets were looking for software to control the trans-Siberian pipeline. So the CIA allowed the Soviets to steal a sabotaged version of the American software, which in 1982 caused an explosion large enough to be seen from space that destroyed a large portion of the Russian pipeline. Depriving the Soviets of potentially $8 billion a year in oil revenues, it is probably the greatest spy exploit achieved during the Cold War.

But these days the United States mostly operates as something like the backstop, the guarantor of world order, in the new cybernetic space. Or, at least, that's how it should be. There looms "an Armageddon," Klimburg writes, that only the "liberal democracies have the power to avert." But the American spy agencies have reserved for themselves the right to act as international rogue warriors in the cyber realm and thereby weaken the power of the United States to keep the internet in balance. The WannaCry ransomware attack exploited a mysteriously leaked vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that the NSA had previously discovered but not reported, hoping to use the vulnerability for its own spy work. Again and again, Klimburg insists, the American attempt "to achieve total dominance" in internet warfare "can be safely said to have totally backfired."

The overwriting and failure of tone in such clauses form a problem for The Darkening Web. Sentence by sentence, Klimburg just isn't a good writer, studding his text with confusing acronyms and launching into unnecessarily long-winded explanations of topics that weren't necessary for his point in the first placeas when he wanders into an excursus about "path dependency" without much of a clear path back out again.

Chapter by chapter, however, Klimburg has written a powerful and frightening book. The internet is, he thinks, "a fabulous artifice of human civilization," and its (mostly libertarian) early proponents taught us the belief that it would be a device "for advancing freedoms and prosperity." Unfortunately, the current direction of the Cold War of Cyberspace means it may well "become instead a dark web of subjugation." The "international cyber arms race" is "threatening the overall stability and security . . . of our very societies."

The Darkening Web asks us to distinguish three different species of computer attacks. The first is the genuinely and immediately violent: the cyber equivalent of actual war in which we hack a system to turn off automated defenses or cause a dam or a power grid to fail. The 2015 Russian assault on the Ukranian electrical system makes for a clear example.

The second form of computerized attack is the hack for informationloudly announced when done for political effect, but often kept quiet as secret spy work. The phishing attack that cracked the Democratic party's email servers during the 2016 presidential race is an obvious case of an attack in search of embarrassing or sensitive information.

Finally, there is the role of propaganda through the internet, in the form of pushing fake news or the form of restricting disfavored speech. Russia dominates recent press accounts about the first form, but China is the master of the second. Under pressure from Beijing, Apple recently removed from its app store hundreds of apps for its Chinese customers, including the app for the New York Times. The list of words banned by China for social media runs for pages.

Klimburg doesn't give his readers much of a solution for all of this. He insists that the internet needs to remain free, in order to combat the propagandists, but the freedom of the internet is exactly what the other two kinds of computerized attack rely on when they insinuate themselves into sensitive places.

What Klimburg does see clearly, however, is the opportunity that the "internet of things" offers for hacking. Our cars, our refrigerators, our crockpots, and our cameras are increasingly connected to the web these days, and there are, by one estimate, 25 billion devices online in the world today. Each of them is vulnerable and each of them offers a small opportunity for corruption, an accident waiting to happen. As that interconnectedness is extended to our power grids, our sewer systems, and our transportation networks, the chance for murderous attacks grows every year.

The Cyber Cold War is being fought among a swirl of opponents in a swirl of battles. It resembles the original Cold War in the fact that government-sponsored attacks on major institutions are avoided out of fear of retaliation. For that matter, it mirrors the old struggle against the Soviets in its constantly changing naturerequiring the United States always to keep moving ahead, just to stay even.

Read more:
Software and Hard Consequences - Washington Free Beacon

The Libreboot T400 doesnt look like much. Its basically a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad with the traditional Lenovo/IBM pointer nubbin and a small touchpad. Its a plain black laptop, as familiar as any luggable assigned to a cubicle warrior on the road. But, under the hood, you have a machine that fights for freedom.

The T400 runs Libreboot, a free and open BIOS and the Trisquel GNU/Linux OS. Both of these tools should render the Libreboot T400 as secure from tampering as can be. Your Libreboot T400 obeys you, and nobody else! write its creators, and that seems to be the case.

How does it work? And should you spend about $300 on a refurbished Thinkpad with Linux installed? That depends on what youre trying to do. The model I tested was on the low end with enough speed and performance to count but Trisquel tended to bog down a bit and the secure browser, an unbranded Mozilla based browser that never recommends non-free software, was a little too locked down for its own good. I was able to work around a number of the issues I had but this is definitely not for the faint of heart.

That said, you are getting a nearly fully open computer. The 14.1-inch machine runs a Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 processor and starts at 4GB of RAM with 160GB hard drive space. That costs about $257 plus shipping and includes a battery and US charger.

Once you have the T400 youre basically running a completely clean machine. It runs a free (as in freedom) operating system complete with open drivers and applications and Libreboot ensures that you have no locked-down software on the machine. You could easily recreate this package yourself on your own computer but I suspect that you, like me, would eventually run into a problem that couldnt be solved entirely with free software. Hence the impetus to let Minifree do the work for you.

If youre a crusader for privacy, security, and open standards, than this laptop is for you. Thankfully its surprisingly cheap and quite rugged so youre not only sticking it to the man but you could possibly buy a few of these and throw them at the man in a pinch.

The era of common Linux on the desktop and not in the form of a secure, libre device like this is probably still to come. While its trivial (and fun) to install a Linux instance these days I doubt anyone would do it outright on a laptop that theyre using on a daily basis. But for less than a price of a cellphone you can use something like the T400 and feel safe and secure that youre not supporting (many) corporate interests when it comes to your computing experience. Its not a perfect laptop by any stretch but its just the thing if youre looking for something that no one but you controls.

See more here:
The Minifree Libreboot T400 is free as in freedom - TechCrunch