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Trall AS

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**SEONGNAM-SI, Korea, April 3rd, 2024/Chainwire/--**TRALA LAB aims to leverage zkSync to accelerate new gaming era for millions of players TRALA LAB has announced a strategic commitment to build on zkSync, a cutting-edge zero-knowledge (ZK) technology. TRALA LAB is a subsidiary of Joycity that has gained significant popularity in the global gaming market with blockbuster releases such as ‘Gunship Battle’ and ‘Freestyle’. TRALA LAB has also entered into a collaboration with Matter Labs. Through the collaboration, TRALA LAB intends to leverage its comprehensive technical expertise and development support to publish a diverse range of AAA games on zkSync. Furthermore, the strategic collaboration between TRALA LAB and Matter Labs marks a significant step towards driving innovation and addressing key challenges in the global gaming market. TRALA LAB is dedicated to revolutionizing the gaming landscape by addressing critical issues such as the lack of quality game content. With a focus on building long-term sustainable gaming platforms, TRALA LAB is set to onboard a range of AAA global game IPs, including highly successful titles like the Gunship Battle mobile game and the online sports game Freestyle, which recorded cumulative downloads of 150 million and 160 million respectively, across the world. TRALA LAB aims to set new standards for quality game content while leveraging its established global marketing channels spanning 249 countries to introduce a new wave to the world stage. In addition to onboarding TRALA LAB’s games into the zkSync ecosystem, the strategic collaboration will involve collaborative efforts on the launch of TRALA’s gaming platform, utilizing the ZK Stack. Rich Kim, Head of Web3 Entertainment and Media at Matter Labs, stated, "Joycity already has a proven record of being a successful global gaming company and owns numerous successful IPs. We are excited to see a variety of AAA games enter the zkSync ecosystem through TRALA in the future, and we also look forward to stimulating zkSync's gaming ecosystem."TRALA LAB BD director Ivan Chung stated, "This collaboration with Matter Labs marks the first step in pioneering new avenues in the global gaming market, and we have high expectations for the synergy between TRALA LAB and Matter Labs. We are very pleased and excited to be able to contribute to the zkSync ecosystem through our games. Please keep an eye on us." About Trala is an all-in-one blockchain gaming platform that aims to revolutionize the game industry by creating a simple and fun gaming experience. It provides an immersive and engaging environment for users to play, compete and interact with one another. Trala Lab | | | Website Twitter Medium Discord Contact Sr. Account Director Pete Padovano M Group ppadovano@mgroupsc.com This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here.

TRALA LAB Commits To zkSync To Revolutionize And Advance Global Gaming Industry

THE MOUNTAINS AND PLAINS OF THE MOON, AND THE SPECTACLES OF THE SUN

The Evolution of Modern Medicine, by William Osler is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . here ARABIAN MEDICINE THE third and by far the strongest branch of the Greek river reached the West after a remarkable and meandering course. The map before you shows the distribution of the Graeco-Roman Christian world at the beginning of the seventh century. You will notice that Christianity had extended far eastwards, almost to China. Most of those eastern Christians were Nestorians and one of their important centres was Edessa, whose school of learning became so celebrated. Here in the fifth century was built one of the most celebrated hospitals of antiquity. Now look at another map showing the same countries about a century later. No such phenomenal change ever was made within so short space of time as that which thus altered the map of Asia and Europe at this period. Within a century, the Crescent had swept from Arabia through the Eastern Empire, over Egypt, North Africa and over Spain in the West, and the fate of Western Europe hung in the balance before the gates of Tours in 732. This time the barbaric horde that laid waste a large part of Christendom were a people that became deeply appreciative of all that was best in Graeco-Roman civilization and of nothing more than of its sciences. The cultivation of medicine was encouraged by the Arabs in a very special way. Anyone wishing to follow the history of the medical profession among this remarkable people will find it admirably presented in Lucien Leclerc's "Histoire de la medecine arabe" (Paris, 1876). An excellent account is also given in Freind's well-known "History of Medicine" (London, 1725-1726). Here I can only indicate very briefly the course of the stream and its freightage. With the rise of Christianity, Alexandria became a centre of bitter theological and political factions, the story of which haunts the memory of anyone who was so fortunate as to read in his youth Kingsley's "Hypatia." These centuries, with their potent influence of neoplatonism on Christianity, appear to have been sterile enough in medicine. I have already referred to the late Greeks, Aetius and Alexander of Tralles. The last of the Alexandrians was a remarkable man, Paul of AEgina, a great name in medicine and in surgery, who lived in the early part of the seventh century. He also, like Oribasius, was a great compiler. In the year 640, the Arabs took Alexandria, and for the third time a great library was destroyed in the "first city of the West." Shortly after the conquest of Egypt, Greek works were translated into Arabic, often through the medium of Syriac, particularly certain of Galen's books on medicine, and chemical writings, which appear to have laid the foundation of Arabian knowledge on this subject. Through Alexandria then was one source: but the special development of the Greek science and of medicine took place in the ninth century under the Eastern Caliphates. Let me quote here a couple of sentences from Leclerc (Tome I, pp. 91-92): "The world has but once witnessed so marvellous a spectacle as that presented by the Arabs in the ninth century. This pastoral people, whose fanaticism had suddenly made them masters of half of the world, having once founded their empire, immediately set themselves to acquire that knowledge of the sciences which alone was lacking to their greatness. Of all the invaders who competed for the last remains of the Roman Empire they alone pursued such studies; while the Germanic hordes, glorying in their brutality and ignorance, took a thousand years to re-unite the broken chain of tradition, the Arabs accomplished this in less than a century. They provoked the competition of the conquered Christians—a healthy competition which secured the harmony of the races. "At the end of the eighth century, their whole scientific possessions consisted of a translation of one medical treatise and some books on alchemy. Before the ninth century had run to its close, the Arabs were in possession of all the science of the Greeks; they had produced from their own ranks students of the first order, and had raised among their initiators men who, without them, would have been groping in the dark; and they showed from this time an aptitude for the exact sciences, which was lacking in their instructors, whom they henceforward surpassed." It was chiefly through the Nestorians that the Arabs became acquainted with Greek medicine, and there were two famous families of translators, the Bakhtishuas and the Mesues, both Syrians, and probably not very thoroughly versed in either Greek or Arabic. But the prince of translators, one of the finest figures of the century, was Honein, a Christian Arab, born in 809, whose name was Latinized as Joannitius. "The marvellous extent of his works, their excellence, their importance, the trials he bore nobly at the beginning of his career, everything about him arouses our interest and sympathy. If he did not actually create the Oriental renaissance movement, certainly no one played in it a more active, decided and fruitful part."(10) His industry was colossal. He translated most of the works of Hippocrates and Galen, Aristotle and many others. His famous "Introduction" or "Isagoge," a very popular book in the Middle Ages, is a translation of the "Microtegni" of Galen, a small hand-book, of which a translation is appended to Cholmeley's "John of Gaddesden."(11) The first printed edition of it appeared in 1475 (see Chapter IV) at Padua. Leclerc gives the names of more than one hundred known translators who not only dealt with the physicians but with the Greek philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers. The writings of the physicians of India and of Persia were also translated into Arabic. But close upon the crowd of translators who introduced the learning of Greece to the Arabians came original observers of the first rank, to a few only of whom time will allow me to refer. Rhazes, so called from the name of the town (Rai) in which he was born, was educated at the great hospital at Bagdad in the second half of the ninth century. With a true Hippocratic spirit he made many careful observations on disease, and to him we owe the first accurate account of smallpox, which he differentiated from measles. This work was translated for the old Sydenham Society by W.A. Greenhill (1848), and the description given of the disease is well worth reading. He was a man of strong powers of observation, good sense and excellent judgment. His works were very popular, particularly the gigantic "Continens," one of the bulkiest of incunabula. The Brescia edition, 1486, a magnificent volume, extends over 588 pages and it must weigh more than seventeen pounds. It is an encyclopaedia filled with extracts from the Greek and other writers, interspersed with memoranda of his own experiences. His "Almansor" was a very popular text-book, and one of the first to be printed. Book IX of "Almansor" (the name of the prince to whom it was addressed) with the title "De aegritudinibus a capite usque ad pedes," was a very favorite mediaeval text-book. On account of his zeal for study Rhazes was known as the "Experimentator." The first of the Arabians, known throughout the Middle Ages as the Prince, the rival, indeed, of Galen, was the Persian Ibn Sina, better known as Avicenna, one of the greatest names in the history of medicine. Born about 980 A. D. in the province of Khorasan, near Bokhara, he has left a brief autobiography from which we learn something of his early years. He could repeat the Koran by heart when ten years old, and at twelve he had disputed in law and in logic. So that he found medicine was an easy subject, not hard and thorny like mathematics and metaphysics! He worked night and day, and could solve problems in his dreams. "When I found a difficulty," he says, "I referred to my notes and prayed to the Creator. At night, when weak or sleepy, I strengthened myself with a glass of wine."(12) He was a voluminous writer to whom scores of books are attributed, and he is the author of the most famous medical text-book ever written. It is safe to say that the "Canon" was a medical bible for a longer period than any other work. It "stands for the epitome of all precedent development, the final codification of all Graeco-Arabic medicine. It is a hierarchy of laws liberally illustrated by facts which so ingeniously rule and are subject to one another, stay and uphold one another, that admiration is compelled for the sagacity of the great organiser who, with unparalleled power of systematisation, collecting his material from all sources, constructed so imposing an edifice of fallacy. Avicenna, according to his lights, imparted to contemporary medical science the appearance of almost mathematical accuracy, whilst the art of therapeutics, although empiricism did not wholly lack recognition, was deduced as a logical sequence from theoretical (Galenic and Aristotelian) premises. Is it, therefore, matter for surprise that the majority of investigators and practitioners should have fallen under the spell of this consummation of formalism and should have regarded the 'Canon' as an infallible oracle, the more so in that the logical construction was impeccable and the premises, in the light of contemporary conceptions, passed for incontrovertible axioms?"(13) Innumerable manuscripts of it exist: of one of the most beautiful, a Hebrew version (Bologna Library), I give an illustration. A Latin version was printed in 1472 and there are many later editions, the last in 1663. Avicenna was not only a successful writer, but the prototype of the successful physician who was at the same time statesman, teacher, philosopher and literary man. Rumor has it that he became dissipated, and a contemporary saying was that all his philosophy could not make him moral, nor all his physic teach him to preserve his health. He enjoyed a great reputation as a poet. I reproduce a page of a manuscript of one of his poems, which we have in the Bodleian Library. Prof. A.V.W. Jackson says that some of his verse is peculiarly Khayyamesque, though he antedated Omar by a century. That "large Infidel" might well have written such a stanza as His hymn to the Deity might have been written by Plato and rivals the famous one of Cleanthes.(14) A casual reader gets a very favorable impression of Avicenna. The story of his dominion over the schools in the Middle Ages is one of the most striking in our history. Perhaps we feel that Leclerc exaggerates when he says: "Avicenna is an intellectual phenomenon. Never perhaps has an example been seen of so precocious, quick and wide an intellect extending and asserting itself with so strange and indefatigable an activity." The touch of the man never reached me until I read some of his mystical and philosophical writings translated by Mehren.(15) It is Plato over again. The beautiful allegory in which men are likened to birds snared and caged until set free by the Angel of Death might be met with anywhere in the immortal Dialogues. The tractate on Love is a commentary on the Symposium; and the essay on Destiny is Greek in spirit without a trace of Oriental fatalism, as you may judge from the concluding sentence, which I leave you as his special message: "Take heed to the limits of your capacity and you will arrive at a knowledge of the truth! How true is the saying:—Work ever and to each will come that measure of success for which Nature has designed him." Avicenna died in his fifty-eighth year. When he saw that physic was of no avail, resigning himself to the inevitable, he sold his goods, distributed the money to the poor, read the Koran through once every three days, and died in the holy month of Ramadan. His tomb at Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, still exists, a simple brickwork building, rectangular in shape, and surrounded by an unpretentious court. It was restored in 1877, but is again in need of repair. The illustration here shown is from a photograph sent by Dr. Neligan of Teheran. Though dead, the great Persian has still a large practice, as his tomb is much visited by pilgrims, among whom cures are said to be not uncommon. The Western Caliphate produced physicians and philosophers almost as brilliant as those of the East. Remarkable schools of medicine were founded at Seville, Toledo and Cordova. The most famous of the professors were Averroes, Albucasis and Avenzoar. Albucasis was "the Arabian restorer of surgery." Averroes, called in the Middle Ages "the Soul of Aristotle" or "the Commentator," is better known today among philosophers than physicians. On the revival of Moslem orthodoxy he fell upon evil days, was persecuted as a free-thinker, and the saying is attributed to him—"Sit anima mea cum philosophic." Arabian medicine had certain very definite characteristics: the basis was Greek, derived from translations of the works of Hippocrates and Galen. No contributions were made to anatomy, as dissections were prohibited, nor to physiology, and the pathology was practically that of Galen. Certain new and important diseases were described; a number of new and active remedies were introduced, chiefly from the vegetable kingdom. The Arabian hospitals were well organized and were deservedly famous. No such hospital exists today in Cairo as that which was built by al-Mansur Gilafun in 1283. The description of it by Makrizi, quoted by Neuburger,(16) reads like that of a twentieth century institution with hospital units. (16) "I have founded this institution for my equals and for those beneath me, it is intended for rulers and subjects, for soldiers and for the emir, for great and small, freemen and slaves, men and women." "He ordered medicaments, physicians and everything else that could be required by anyone in any form of sickness; placed male and female attendants at the disposal of the patients, determined their pay, provided beds for patients and supplied them with every kind of covering that could be required in any complaint. Every class of patient was accorded separate accommodation: the four halls of the hospital were set apart for those with fever and similar complaints; one part of the building was reserved for eye-patients, one for the wounded, one for those suffering from diarrhoea, one for women; a room for convalescents was divided into two parts, one for men and one for women. Water was laid on to all these departments. One room was set apart for cooking food, preparing medicine and cooking syrups, another for the compounding of confections, balsams, eye-salves, etc. The head-physician had an apartment to himself wherein he delivered medical lectures. The number of patients was unlimited, every sick or poor person who came found admittance, nor was the duration of his stay restricted, and even those who were sick at home were supplied with every necessity."—Makrizi. "In later times this hospital was much extended and improved. The nursing was admirable and no stint was made of drugs and appliances; each patient was provided with means upon leaving so that he should not require immediately to undertake heavy work." Neuburger: History of Medicine, Vol. 1, p. 378. It was in the domain of chemistry that the Arabs made the greatest advances. You may remember that, in Egypt, chemistry had already made considerable strides, and I alluded to Prof. Elliot Smith's view that one of the great leaps in civilization was the discovery in the Nile Valley of the metallurgy of copper. In the brilliant period of the Ptolemies, both chemistry and pharmacology were studied, and it seems not improbable that, when the Arabs took Alexandria in the year 640, there were still many workers in these subjects. The most famous of those early Arabic writers is the somewhat mythical Geber, who lived in the first half of the eighth century, and whose writings had an extraordinary influence throughout the Middle Ages. The whole story of Geber is discussed by Berthelot in his "La chimie au moyen age" (Paris, 1896). The transmission of Arabian science to the Occident began with the Crusades, though earlier a filtering of important knowledge in mathematics and astronomy had reached Southern and Middle Europe through Spain. Among the translators several names stand out prominently. Gerbert, who became later Pope Sylvester II, is said to have given us our present Arabic figures. You may read the story of his remarkable life in Taylor,(17) who says he was "the first mind of his time, its greatest teacher, its most eager learner, and most universal scholar." But he does not seem to have done much directly for medicine. The Graeco-Arabic learning passed into Europe through two sources. As I have already mentioned, Constantinus Africanus, a North African Christian monk, widely travelled and learned in languages, came to Salernum and translated many works from Arabic into Latin, particularly those of Hippocrates and Galen. The "Pantegni" of the latter became one of the most popular text-books of the Middle Ages. A long list of other works which he translated is given by Steinschneider.(17a) It is not unlikely that Arabic medicine had already found its way to Salernum before the time of Constantine, but the influence of his translations upon the later Middle Ages was very great. The second was a more important source through the Latin translators in Spain, particularly in Toledo, where, from the middle of the twelfth till the middle of the thirteenth century, an extraordinary number of Arabic works in philosophy, mathematics and astronomy were translated. Among the translators, Gerard of Cremona is prominent, and has been called the "Father of Translators." He was one of the brightest intelligences of the Middle Ages, and did a work of the first importance to science, through the extraordinary variety of material he put in circulation. Translations, not only of the medical writers, but of an indiscriminate crowd of authors in philosophy and general literature, came from his pen. He furnished one of the first translations of the famous "Almagest" of Ptolemy, which opened the eyes of his contemporaries to the value of the Alexandrian astronomy.(18) Leclerc gives a list of seventy-one works from his hand. Many of the translators of the period were Jews, and many of the works were translated from Hebrew into Latin. For years Arabic had been the learned language of the Jews, and in a large measure it was through them that the Arabic knowledge and the translations passed into South and Central Europe. The Arab writer whose influence on mediaeval thought was the most profound was Averroes, the great commentator on Aristotle. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022 from Osler, William. 2006. The Evolution of Modern Medicine. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1566/1566-h/1566-h.htm#link2H_4_0019 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html Photo by on National Cancer Institute Unsplash

The Evolution of Modern Medicine: Chapter III - ARABIAN MEDICINE

The Evolution of Modern Medicine, by William Osler is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . here BYZANTINE MEDICINE THE second great stream which carried Greek medicine to modern days runs through the Eastern Empire. Between the third century and the fall of Constantinople there was a continuous series of Byzantine physicians whose inspiration was largely derived from the old Greek sources. The most distinguished of these was Oribasius, a voluminous compiler, a native of Pergamon and so close a follower of his great townsman that he has been called "Galen's ape." He left many works, an edition of which was edited by Bussemaker and Daremberg. Many facts relating to the older writers are recorded in his writings. He was a contemporary, friend as well as the physician, of the Emperor Julian, for whom he prepared an encyclopaedia of the medical sciences. Other important Byzantine writers were Aetius and Alexander of Tralles, both of whom were strongly under the influence of Galen and Hippocrates. Their materia medica was based largely upon Dioscorides. From Byzantium we have the earliest known complete medical manuscript, dating from the fifth century—a work of Dioscorides—one of the most beautiful in existence. It was prepared for Anicia Juliana, daughter of the Emperor of the East, and is now one of the great treasures of the Imperial Library at Vienna.(9) From those early centuries till the fall of Constantinople there is very little of interest medically. A few names stand out prominently, but it is mainly a blank period in our records. Perhaps one man may be mentioned, as he had a great influence on later ages—Actuarius, who lived about 1300, and whose book on the urine laid the foundation of much of the popular uroscopy and water-casting that had such a vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His work on the subject passed through a dozen Latin editions, but is best studied in Ideler's "Physici et medici Graeci minores" (Berlin, 1841). The Byzantine stream of Greek medicine had dwindled to a very tiny rill when the fall of Constantinople (1453) dispersed to the West many Greek scholars and many precious manuscripts. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022 from Osler, William. 2006. The Evolution of Modern Medicine. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1566/1566-h/1566-h.htm#link2H_4_0018 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html Photo by on National Cancer Institute Unsplash

The Evolution of Modern Medicine: Chapter III - BYZANTINE MEDICINE

Top Blockchain Development Companies | March 2022

For the second year, members of our BIP Capital team came together in at the end of 2019 to discuss the year’s biggest technology and business trends, as well as what opportunities and barriers ahead as we move through 2020. The discussion also included leaders from a number of our portfolio companies so that they could offer their own unique perspectives, especially as they relate to the challenges of growing a successful business. Participating in the discussion from BIP Capital: – As a founder, Buffington has built a handful of successful businesses himself and now focuses on growing the Healthcare IT practice within BIP Capital’s portfolio. His most notable deals include Vendormate, Ingenious Med, PlayOn! Sports, and others. Mark Buffington, Co-Founder and CEO Drechsel has worked with leading innovators that include S1 and Global Energy Decisions. He oversees the firm’s investments in SaaS, FinTech, and Dev Tools/Architecture. Dan Drechsel, Senior VP – Flickinger focuses on fundraising, talent acquisition, marketing/branding, and accelerating the growth of the firm’s portfolio companies. His portfolio coverage includes AchieveIt, PlayOn! Sports, VoApps, and others. Mark Flickinger, COO – Iaffaldano is a builder of market-leading companies, with particular expertise in the communications and media industry. Notable deals include Blinq Media, SeniorLiving.net, Brightwhistle, and more. Paul Iaffaldano, CIO – Participating from BIP Capital’s portfolio companies: Huddle is the nation’s preeminent provider of physical and digital high school event tickets. Leveraging its client base of over 9,000 high schools, Huddle is the exclusive provider of digital tickets to the NFHS Network and is rolling out GoFan, its digital ticketing platform, nationwide. Jeff Cravens, CEO, Huddle – DemandJump’s comprehensive marketing platform uses AI to provide actionable insights and intelligent recommendations, allowing marketers to track campaign performance and position themselves to effectively engage with customers. Christopher Day, Co-founder and CEO, DemandJump – Trella Health, formerly Excel Health, utilizes one of the most current, comprehensive, and robust medical claims databases in the world to deliver critical healthcare analytics to their clients, positively impacting a patient’s care path. Ian Juliano, CEO, Trella Health – Kobiton delivers the needed real device management infrastructure to make native mobile applications work. Powered by AI, Kobiton enables non-technical users to create test scripts to automatically run across hundreds of different device and operating system combinations, leading to faster QA delivery with fewer resources and higher app quality. Kevin Lee, CEO, Kobiton – Round-Table Q&A Q: How is technology helping to put a “science” behind marketing for greater ROI? If the last big trend in marketing was “data,” the next big trend is correlation coefficient, which is a statistical measure of how strong a relationship is between two variables. This is something that’s now being applied to marketing in order to better determine what customer attributes have a causal relationship to the desired outcome—something extremely beneficial to marketers. Just as it is the force behind many of today’s innovating technologies, artificial intelligence will help to drive our ability to apply and use correlating data in this manner. Iaffaldano (BIP Capital): Another trend is consumer behavior mapping (CBM), and it’s something DemandJump is leveraging, both internally and externally for our customers, to dramatically improve marketing ROI. CBMs enable us to see the most powerful questions, searches, websites, videos, and more, all ranked in order, for any product or service. The results often double the performance of marketing campaigns through increased traffic, conversions, revenue, and cost savings. Consumer behavior insights have largely been outside the view of the marketer until now and I think this is one of the most exciting breakthroughs we have seen in the last 20 years. Day (DemandJump): Q: What are some of the biggest challenges facing healthcare and how can technology help? Reducing costs and improving outcomes continue to be two of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Both require greater coordination and collaboration among healthcare providers than ever before. We’re even seeing an increasing number of employers taking a more active role to reduce costs through things like managing their networks and negotiating contracts directly. Technology can be a great enabler of coordination and collaboration. Today, most providers have no idea what happens to their patients outside of their four walls. Without a solution like Trella, this makes any type of performance benchmarking nearly impossible. So to start, analytics solutions like ours can help organizations identify and build their care networks based on performance and outcomes data. This will in turn drive innovation to improve outcomes and reduce costs dramatically. Juliano (Trella Health): We’re really excited about the progress at Trella Health. Trella’s unique set of solutions enables post-acute providers, hospital systems, and payers (including Medicaid and Medicare) to save billions of dollars annually by optimizing the cost/quality dynamic and by eliminating waste. One of the states that is beginning to explore the use of Trella’s solution found that by simply empowering healthcare decision makers to select equivalent quality, low-cost providers, the state could save $600 million annually in its Medicare spend. Regardless of which side of the healthcare debate you’re on, our system of healthcare is in dire need of tools like Trella. Buffington (BIP Capital): Q: What trends impacted the SaaS market in 2019? What trends do you foresee on the horizon for 2020? In 2019, pressure started to emerge to contain spending in growth companies where the growth rate was not significantly above average, with the target being the rate at which investors believe a SaaS business must grow to deliver returns of 8-20x. This seems to be 80%+ at this point in the investment cycle. This is pushing some companies to “burn” less than $250,000 per month, when previously they were incurring significantly higher burn rates. Drechsel (BIP Capital): In 2020, one trend we’ll see is the introduction of broad applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Examples of this include our portfolio company Kobiton, which automates the production of test scripts for testing mobile applications across many phone platforms. Another of our portfolio companies, , is using AI for image capture by drone and manned aerial platforms to assess the condition of large assets. Pointivo A couple of trends come to mind. With the maturation of machine learning and artificial intelligence engines, SaaS companies can much more readily and inexpensively leverage capabilities that previously required on-premise or global enterprise resources to implement. This allows SaaS organizations to expand their total addressable markets to solutions that previously were only affordable as offshore resources working in large teams. ML and AI truly provide a higher quality result faster at a much lower cost. Lee (Kobiton): Another trend is the effective use of buyer intent data to make SaaS prospecting and sales teams more productive. With regulations like GDPR now implemented, capabilities are being developed where privacy can be maintained while allowing SaaS organizations to actively target individuals and businesses that are signaling their intent to acquire certain SaaS solutions. Q: As a leader in a high-growth company, what advice would you give new companies just starting out in 2020? First, you need to work smart and hard to get to a business model and value proposition for your customers that make sense. Then you have to align your resources to get there. The most important aspect of that resource alignment is getting the right people in the right seat on the bus, then creating a performance culture where your people excel in a way that drives the business forward. Cravens (Huddle): Set out to solve a pain that your customer can’t solve on its own. In order to ensure you’re doing that, get close to your target customer and walk in their shoes to thoroughly understand the problem, inside and out. Oftentimes, a good idea turns into a product that is directionally correct but doesn’t hit the bullseye of your customer’s needs. Lots of time and money can be saved by engaging in market research in the beginning and using it to inform your product roadmap. Early effort on this will increase your chances of success. Flickinger (BIP Capital): For more insights into emerging trends and our region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, download BIP Capital’s report. The State of StartupsSM in the Southeast

Tech Round Table: The Biggest Challenges in 2019 and Predictions for 2020

30 Top Blockchain Development Companies in 2019

This is republished from my newsletter at inside.com/ai . For the past few years as AI has risen in stature, we have witnessed regular takedowns of the tech and posts about why this is just another temporary boom preceding another AI winter. Filip Piekniewski back in May arguing that an AI winter was well on it’s way. Other takes on the subject include by Ron Schmelzer and a in Popular Science. But I don’t buy it. wrote a great piece an analysis very recent piece The biggest problem with AI is that it’s different tech, and the world has changed a lot since previous AI winters. But soooo many people in tech constantly use the frameworks of the last technology wave to evaluate the current one. Several of my own experiences have reinforced this. I remember keying in to the topic when Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital hosted a small dinner in Boston many years ago. Josh sold Half.com to Ebay so was known as an ecommerce guy. But that was 1999, and this dinner was probably 2011 or 2012. Josh said ecommerce entrepreneurs come to him because of his experience but, then he noted that the three biggest customer acquisition channels for most of them: Social, Mobile, SEO, were not even around when he built Half.com. He wasn’t sure his personal experiences were relevant to modern ecommerce companies. (side note — all the best investors I’ve seen have this kind of intellectual humility and self awareness). My last company was a SaaS company started in December 2008. Many of our early investors did not understand SaaS metrics. I constantly had to fight the battle of being judged by the metrics of the packaged software industry rather than as a recurring revenue business. While the laggards came around, it was a lot of education on my part, and from the more progressive investors on my Board, to get everyone comfortable with MRR, CAC, and LTV. AI is where SaaS was in 2009. Most people don’t understand that it requires different frameworks to evaluate it. So when I read about an AI winter, I’m very skeptical that people are looking at the right signals. Consider this — most of the AI news that has driven hype cycles over the past 3 years is just research. Very little of it has been news about really great AI applied in products. That research news is stalling not because AI is stalling, but because AI is working it’s way from the research labs into more applications. The problems to solve there are real, and aren’t very sexy to write about. I see this at . Our team recently worked to put a model into the product. While it’s a model that can perform really well in isolation on a synthetic data set, getting it to work in the real world was messy. We had to solve a bunch of very pragmatic implementation problems, and some conceptual problems (the model always returns an answer, and we had to train it not to return something if the answer isn’t good or relevant). They weren’t sexy or newsworthy, but we believe we pushed practical implementations of Bidaf forward pretty far. Talla Bidaf Machine Comprehension Enterprise adoption of AI is still in the very early days. Again, I see this first hand in Talla’s sales pipeline. Two years ago, no one had budget for an AI project. One year ago, a few really forward thinking companies had budget for prototypes and paid pilots. Now, those more progressive companies have budgets and projects and requirements all around AI. It’s still small but, the difference is noticeable. It will be 5–7 years before all enterprises are educated enough on AI to start buying and implementing it effectively. Previous AI winters have happened because things never really made it out of the research lab into real adoption, outside of very targeted use cases. Now, while we definitely aren’t seeing the amazing we-are-close-to-GAI types of applications that the research sometimes suggests should be here, we are seeing real applications that have real value in the world. The framework I use for thinking about it is actually a consumer adoption framework that I first learned about from BIjan Sabet of Spark Capital, when he spoke at a conference. He said too many investors who don’t invest in consumer companies regularly freak out when growth of new users stalls, but that, it happens all the time. Consumer companies go through waves of viral adoption vs deeper user engagement, and so, he said that the right way to think about it is as this oscillating wave. You get a bunch of new users, and then user growth slows, so you focus on getting the existing user base more engaged. This eventually leads to a new viral growth trend, etc. I think a similar framework will drive AI adoption for the next decade. Companies will deploy the latest and greatest out of research labs, but it will be slow. They have to find (and cleanse) data sets that work. They have to solve pragmatic problems like whether inference should happen on the edge, or centralized in the cloud (which has both performance and privacy issues), how to shard large models in production systems, how to effectively QA models that have probabilistic outputs, and much more. These things take time. So I think what you will see in AI going forward is an oscillation between smarter algorithms that do cooler things, then what seems like stalled innovation but is really just the practical time period of everyone being more concerned with applying the new algorithms rather than inventing new ones. Once the new stuff gets deployed into production systems effectively, we will shift back to focusing on algorithm performance problems (rather than those due to implementation challenges) and need better algorithmic approaches. I don’t think we are headed into another AI winter. I think we are just in a different part of the oscillation wave — laying the groundwork for the next research boom beyond DNNs. On top of that, you have massive innovation in neuromorphic chips and tool sets to make deep learning more easily applied by non-experts. Both of these will take a few years to really take hold, but they will break the frameworks people currently use to think about what products and services can be built with AI. I’m particularly excited about the innovation that will come from breaking the x86 chip architecture framework we’ve relied on for so long. In summary, I think this talk of an AI winter is wrong. It’s focused on a slow down in the research, but that’s a combination of over-hyped research news along with the slow arduous work of really getting these systems running in enterprises. Don’t underinvest in AI because of this AI winter scare. Now is the time to push forward and lay the groundwork for the next waves.

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