Over the past decade, there’s been a sea change in the way people consume video content. Today’s viewers can download and stream multimedia on their computers, as well as on mobile apps, social media sites, and a variety of connected TV devices, such as Roku, Fire TV, and Apple TV.

Thanks to the proliferation of outlets—and a steep drop in production costs—you no longer have to be a major broadcast network or media conglomerate to gain viewers. Now, even small businesses, state and county governments, and churches are using these non-cable outlets, commonly referred to as “over the top,” or OTT, to reach a whole new audience.

While the barriers to entry are certainly less insurmountable than in the past, independent producers still need the tools to upload, manage, and publish their video and audio content on a wide range of media platforms. Lightcast.com has been helping clients overcome this exact challenge since its inception in 2010.

The company, which has offices in the United States (Charlotte, North Carolina) and Europe, bills itself as the one-stop shop for all its clients’ publishing needs. In addition to providing transcoding services—it creates more than a dozen renditions of each video in different bitrates—it offers a fully functional content management system and the ability to distribute multimedia using one of the world’s largest server networks.

It also helps organizations monetize their content by creating advertising, pay-per-view, and subscription strategies. By eliminating the need to work with video ad networks—what it calls the industry middlemen—the company claims content creators can boost their net revenue.

The “Democratization” of Video

“The shift away from mere streaming on websites to OTT has kept all streaming providers and online video platforms on their toes,” says the company’s managing director, Andreas Kisslinger. “Lightcast.com, in particular, has really enjoyed, welcomed, embraced, and promoted this change as we see the new publishing channels and platforms as a huge opportunity for media publishers.”

For Kisslinger, the changes in the media landscape enable organizations of all stripes to amplify their messages and to expand their reach.

“It’s a chance for democratization of information flow, creativity, and entrepreneurship among independent producers, of which many are highly successful,” he says.

Lightcast, whose Media Cloud solution won the Gold StevieⓇ Award  in The American Business Awards® for New Product or Service of the Year in the CMS category, has tapped in to those opportunities as well as anyone. Its software suite now helps support a multitude of media outlets on social media, connected TV, and mobile apps. Today, InTouch Ministries, Foody TV, and All About Golf are among the thousands of clients Lightcast helps connect with new audiences. It’s an impressive achievement for a company that started with little and worked tirelessly with its “bootstraps” mentality.

“We are all young entrepreneurs from various countries. All self-funded and self-made, without any venture capital or connections behind our backs,” says Kisslinger. “Instead of using investment capital, we built our business exclusively with sweat, blood, and tears—and, most of all, the satisfaction of our customers who share their excitement about our products with others."

Kisslinger acknowledges that keeping a trans-Atlantic operation going isn’t always easy, though. The staff has to continually navigate language and time zone differences to make it work. For Kisslinger, however, what they have in common is more important: a desire to go above and beyond for their customers.

One of the company’s keys to success is a relentless pursuit of the perfect multimedia publishing suite.

“We have a proprietary CRM system and database in which we record every feedback, every wish, and every need customers send us. We do this in order to refine the user interfaces and feature sets of our software-as-a-service offering,” says Kisslinger.

This approach helped the company earn numerous awards for product design over the past few years, but for Kisslinger, snagging the Stevie Award was particularly satisfying.

“We regard the Stevie as one of the most important and prestigious awards a business can win,” he says. “It’s boosted the excitement and self-esteem of our teams—especially among our hardworking coders, web developers, and graphic designers. Everyone is especially excited and grateful over this year's award,” he says.

Businesses are rapidly migrating their data and applications to the cloud, and increasingly taking advantage of the flexibility and functionality of providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to one industry report, 71 percent of enterprise-level companies will increase their spending on the public cloud by 20 percent or more in 2018.

While the benefits of replacing on-premises assets with web storage might seem readily apparent, the conversion itself can present some real challenges. In order to avoid a costly misstep, companies need to put a strategy in place that protects their cloud data and ensures applications work as intended.

Cloud Protection Manager (CPM), a solution the United States based firm N2W Software developed, strives to eliminate those worries.

Designed specifically for AWS, the product offers the ability to back up data as often as necessary, and it recovers that data faster than traditional on-site backup solutions.

“It’s a complex and new IT environment that’s viewed with a lot of uncertainty and challenges, but it doesn’t have to be,” says Jessica Eisenberg, an inbound marketer and customer success manager at N2W Software.

Employing a user-friendly web interface, CPM allows users to manage multiple AWS accounts and to configure policies and schedules to take automated snapshot backups. Clients can recover snapshots, individual volumes or even individual files almost instantaneously, and can recover both in another region or in another account.. It does all this while maintaining compliance with various privacy standards, such as HIPAA, a health data security law in the United States, and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The solution is especially important because, under its Shared Responsibility Model, Amazon is only responsible for the cloud infrastructure itself. However, the customer may assume liability for application software and utilities that it installs on the platform.

The solution is especially important because, under its Shared Responsibility Model, Amazon is only responsible for the cloud infrastructure itself. However, the customer may assume liability for application software and utilities that it installs on the platform.

Big Clients Sign On

The roots of N2W Software date back to 2010, when AWS user Uri Wolloch realized the need for simpler and more scalable backup and recovery capabilities. Wolloch quit his job and began working from home for almost two years to create the first beta version of Cloud Protection Manager.

Since its release, CPM has been used in virtually every vertical market, including finance, health care, mobile, IT, transport, and media. Companies rapidly joined in as enterprises started to weigh the risks of even short periods of downtime. The company’s client list—now totaling more than 1,000 enterprises worldwide—includes the likes of Coca-Cola, Southwest Airlines, Cisco Systems, Oracle, Dyson, Harvard University, and media giant Time Inc.

“Our existing customer base contains the most progressive and forward-looking enterprises in the world—ones which are most interested in acquiring the latest and best cloud backup and disaster recovery technology in order to be prepared for the growing number of data breaches, ransomware attacks, errors, bugs, and weather-related disasters,” Eisenberg says.

The tech community seems to believe growth will only continue as more companies migrate to the cloud. N2W Software, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, United States, completed two rounds of funding in 2017, which was when it also brought in Jason Judge as its new CEO and Andy Langsam as COO.

At that time, the organization’s physical presence swelled to keep up. It now has a development center in Haifa, Israel, as well as satellite offices in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Bucharest, Romania. In January, the private Swiss firm Veeam announced its acquisition of N2W Software for $42.5 million, saying it will continue to operate the business as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Award Boosts Product Awareness

Among the rewards of the buyout was an introduction to the Stevie® Awards, several of which Veeam won in 2015. 

“We knew the Stevies were the premier business awards and that the awarding body is an organization that takes honoring achievements and innovation very seriously,” Eisenberg says.

The panel of judges recognized N2W Software this summer for its pioneering technology. In 2018, N2WS won a Gold Stevie Award in The American Business Awards for New Product or Service of the Year category for Software – Cloud Storage & Backup Solution. The judges noted the efficacy and disaster recovery benefits of CPM, as well as its specialized features, such as robust reporting, alerting, auditing, and dashboard functions.

“The excitement surrounding our company and product is clear recognition of the company’s progress and main goal: to create peace of mind for our customers with valuable data and mission-critical applications in the public cloud,” says Eisenberg. “It has already brought added awareness for customers on AWS that both small glitches and disastrous backup failures can be easily avoided and any single level of downtime can be mitigated.”

There’s nothing more aggravating for a healthcare patient than driving to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription and then learning his or her insurance company won’t cover the cost.

It’s a frustrating scenario for retailers and doctors, too. A significant portion of the medications the pharmacy staff fill won’t be taken home by the patient. Providers then have to go back to the beginning, contacting insurance providers to see if another drug will be covered by the patient’s insurance plan.

The shift toward electronic prior authorization, or ePA, is trying to put the brakes on those system inefficiencies. This trend has been steadily gaining momentum, thanks to wider electronic health record (EHR) usage and new state-level laws aimed at cutting medical costs and improving patient outcomes.

For those who work in the health care industry, it can be hard to keep up with all those developments. Each year, the technology firm CoverMyMeds works with an advisory group of industry experts to publish the annual ePA National Adoption Scorecard, which highlights the progress of ePA in the United States. Readers get up-to-date information on individual state mandates involving prior authorization, as well as updates on what’s happening at the federal level.

The 2018 edition of the scorecard also includes sections on two new areas of opportunity: real-time prescription benefits (RTPB) and solutions geared toward specialty medications.

“As electronic prior authorization implementation continues to increase, the industry is looking for new ways to enhance ePA functionality to benefit industry stakeholders, to continue fueling adoption from pharmacists and providers, and to benefit the patient,” says Perry Lewis, VP of industry relations at CoverMyMeds, whose main offices are in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, United States.

The latest version of the innovative report earned the company a Gold Stevie® Award for the Best Annual Report in the Online/Electronic category at The 16^th Annual American Business Awards..

“The Stevie Award validates all the hard work we put together on our scorecard,” said the CoverMyMeds VP of industry relations, Lewis, at the awards ceremony.

Automating the Process

Even today, many prior authorization requests to the pharmacy and health plan are completed manually—usually by phone or fax. This time-consuming process often leads to patients to abandoning their prescriptions at the pharmacy 36 percent of the time, according to CoverMyMeds.

That creates perils for the patient, who sees an increased risk of future health complications by not taking a prescribed medication. It also means the various players in the health care industry—providers, pharmacies, and insurance plans—allocate unnecessary resources to getting a drug approved. The scorecard notes, for example, that providers who rely exclusively on electronic preauthorization spend 2.5 fewer hours a week on these tasks.

It’s no wonder, then, the sector is quickly gravitating toward ePA, a trend that the proliferation of electronic health records has aided over the past several years. ePA streamlines the process by allowing a physician or other provider to initiate the approval while using the e-prescribing feature of the EHR.

“The most successful ePA strategies also connect the pharmacy to initiate an ePA that was missed at the point of prescribing, and they allow the provider to complete a pharmacy-initiated PA electronically in their EHR or in a designated ePA web portal,” the scorecard says.

Today, 90 percent of insurance payers use ePA, and 96 percent are committed to implementing the method soon. Meanwhile, virtually every pharmacy chain in the country has expressed an intention to use ePA. A growing number of states are adopting ePA language aimed at speeding up the usage rate.

Since its inception in 2008, CoverMyMeds has been at the forefront on this industry change, offering a platform that incorporates nearly every payer and prescription drug on the market. The company, which McKesson Corporation acquired in April 2017, now works with more than 500 EHRs, 62,000 pharmacies, and 700,000 providers in the United States.

The organization launched its yearly National Adoption Scorecard in 2015 as a way to help key stakeholders stay current on legislative updates and other news involving ePA implementation.

The Stevie win not only gave CoverMyMeds a valuable accolade but helped motivate the company to build on the scorecard’s success.

“Since learning about the award,” Lewis says, “the team decided to create a second report that provides an objective overview of real-time benefit check, a technology innovation that surfaces patient-specific prescription benefit details at the point of prescribing.”

References: https://www.covermymeds.com/main/insights/rtbc-scorecard/ 

Real estate is about more than just helping people buy and sell houses; it’s about building communities where families and friends can thrive. Long & Foster (L&F) has guided people home since 1968, and it has become the no. 1 independent brand, by sales volume, in the United States. The productive commercial and residential business has sold more than $31.1 billion worth of buildings, and they helped people buy and sell homes nearly 85,000 times in 2017 alone. To cap it off, they also produce and publish Long & Foster magazine that won the Silver Stevie® Award for Best Print Publication in The 2018 American Business Awards.

Pushing the Boundaries

L&F is a full-service brokerage firm that offers residential and commercial real estate, mortgage, settlement, insurance, property management, corporate relocation, and vacation rental services.

Over the last year, they overhauled and improved their magazine by pushing the boundaries with art, design, and editorials. Winning the Silver Stevie helps validate those important changes.

“We'll continue to push the magazine in this direction by adding quality content and leading-edge design that serve our readership,” says the magazine’s managing editor, Spencer Macli.

L&F Real Estate has over 230 offices, stretching from Raleigh, North Carolina, United States, to Fair Haven, New Jersey, United States, and from Martinsburg, West Virginia, United States, to the Atlantic Ocean. It represents nearly 11,000 agents in seven Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, plus the District of Columbia in the United States.

Starting Small with Big Aspirations

L&F has been around for 50 years, and naturally they’ve witnessed many major changes in the real estate industry. However, they consistently adapted and evolved to remain a leader in the marketplace. In recent years, they’ve experienced firsthand how technology has had a significant impact on real estate—specifically on the way buyers and sellers conduct research.

“There is an abundance of web and mobile apps that have altered the real estate industry in a positive way,” Macli says. “Staying ahead of trends and being a technology leader are at the heart of our mission, and that is why we continue to adapt to the changing ways our clients and potential clients access information about real estate.”

Two guys in a tiny office originally founded the company with little more than a desire to be the best real estate company for agents, employees, and clients. This idea grew into the largest independent real estate brand in the country.

“Cofounder Wes Foster still comes into the office, and he is regularly spotted in the cafeteria talking with employees and offering ideas and encouragement. Without his dedication and commitment, this award-winning magazine would never have been possible. If there's one person to thank for the Stevie, it's likely him,” states Macli.

The Ripple Effect

L&F serves an audience that spans the entire Mid-Atlantic region and is comprised of an engaged readership interested in all aspects of luxury living. To provide the best product for that audience, L&F team members habitually research ideas, discuss their creative direction, and challenge each other.

One particular partnership has been influential in the publication’s success: Christie’s, one of the world’s most recognizable luxury brands. Last year, L&F earned Christie's Affiliate of the Year, which, no doubt, had a positive ripple effect on the magazine.

“Our team strives to surprise and to delight our targeted audience on every page of every issue,” says Macli. “This is the core of our mission as we offer unique insight into luxury living.”

A wedding cake is that rare culinary creation that customers remember for years to come. Naturally, bakers pour their hearts into every delicious detail, whether it’s a pattern of elaborate swirls or elegant, sugary flowers.

Then, of course, they have to transport their handiwork to the reception. That’s where things can get scary. Each unexpected stop or dip in the road has the potential to turn a masterpiece into mush.

Juli Chapin knows this as well as anyone. In the late 1980s, she started a bakery specializing in wedding cakes in the Northeast region of the United States, and she sympathizes with bakers who have to deal with this precarious transport situation. Traditionally, people like her would put each cake tier into a cardboard box and stack the tiers, one on top of the other, at the venue.

“It’s extremely nerve-racking and limits the designs you can create since the majority of the decoration needs to be applied to the stacked cake,” she says. “Bakers have even shut down their wedding cake businesses due to the high stress involved in transportation and the risk of being sued by a bride if something happens to the cake in delivery.”

An Invention Is Born

In Chapin’s case, it helped being married to an engineer who had a knack for solving tricky problems around the house. Upon hearing about her transit issues, her husband, Scott, came up with a clever solution: a rigid container with a stainless steel dowel that ran through the center of the cake to keep it nice and secure. Thanks to a double-walled exterior, it also protected the contents from rain, wind, and scorching summer heat.

For a long time, the couple simply saw it as a convenient solution to their own business problem. The results, however, were so good (in 20 years, Chapin never had a cake damaged on its way to a reception) that they started wondering if the contraption had a broader appeal.

In 2009, the Rhode Island couple started marketing the device to bakeries around the country as the “CakeSafe.” From the start, it was clear they had struck a chord with a lot of bakeries when showing off their invention.

Chapin recalls the early days, when Scott worked around the clock at their home to keep up with demand.

“He’d run his CNC table all night long making products for orders that needed to be shipped the next day,” she says. “He'd hear the machine stop, pause the movie he was watching, and go downstairs to set up the next run on the table.”

Despite the hard work, Chapin says it’s been satisfying to help people in the same situation she was once in.

“Bakers now deliver to mountaintop venues in the snow, down gravel roads with potholes, and on congested highways, all with no stress at all.”

One baker told the couple that she slammed on her brakes on the way to an event, causing her CakeSafe to flip over in the car. She expected to see a pile of crumbs inside but instead found the dessert perfectly intact.

“We've received many phone calls from bakers crying tears of joy because they were able to reopen their wedding cake businesses or grow their businesses because they no longer had any fear of delivery,” says Chapin, who eventually scaled back her own bakery to focus on CakeSafe.

Stevie Award Is Icing on the Cake

Since starting the business nearly a decade ago, Scott hasn’t stopped innovating. The company now offers CakeSafe in a variety of sizes; a safe for cupcakes; spray booths for airbrushing desserts; and a host of other baking implements.

“Scott genuinely loves inventing products to help bakers and to make their lives easier,” Chapin says of her husband, who recently won a Silver Stevie® Award for Product Developer of the Year in The 2018 American Business Awards® . “He never turns down a custom order and is constantly inventing new product lines.”

The company’s reputation within the industry belies its small staff, which only recently moved out of the Chapins’ home into a separate location.

“Whenever customers call the office and Scott or I pick up the phone, they tend to clam up,” she says. “They might say, ‘I never expected to get to talk to you. I'm talking to a celebrity!’ Little do they know, we are only a team of six.”

To this day, the company handcrafts all CakeSafe products, but it’s all a labor of love.

“All the employees have such a passion for their jobs,” she notes. “Scott is a big reason for that.”

It’s gratifying, Chapin notes, for her spouse—and the business he started—to get the extra attention.

“Scott is a brilliant and caring man who deserves to be recognized for his outstanding achievements in the bakery product field,” she says proudly. “Winning a Stevie further legitimizes the company so customers can rest assured their products are coming from a reputable source.”

The 2018 (16th annual) American Business Awards® - the U.S.A's top honors open to all organizations operating in the U.S.A., and feature a wide variety of categories to recognize achievement in every facet of the workplace- will be presented this Monday, June 11 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City.  More than 650 nominees and their guests will attend to be presented with their Grand, Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Awards.

The presentations will be broadcast live, beginning at 6:45 pm ET.

Here are the organizations that as of this writing will be represented at the event on Monday:

3Dazer
4Life Research
A.wordsmith
ACES
Advance Financial
Aflac
AIG US Life
Allianz Global Assistance
Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America
Allscripts
Anthem Foundation
Aragon Advertising
Arise Virtual Solutions Inc.
ArmadaCare
ASG Technologies
Association of International Certified Professional Accountants
Asure Software
Avasant
AXA
Barclays
BD
Best Western Hotels & Resorts
BetterAir
BGRS
BIA
Blis
Bloomberg Environment
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina
BluePay Processing
BlueToad Inc.
botkeeper
Brightstar Corp.
Brillio
Burst
Cathy Turney
Century Business Solutions
Church & Dwight
Cigna
Cisco
Citi
CityOf.com
Clevens Face and Body Specialists
Company
Concentrix
Condeco
Constant Contact Waltham MA
CoverMyMeds
Create Health Plans
Cruise Planners an American Express Travel Representative
Cummins
Cytellix
Davies
Deloitte
Delta Dental of California
DGC International
DHL
Diligent Corporation
DirecTv
Dow Jones
DraftKings
Dynamic Blending
Eff Creative Group
Emory University
Entercom
EpiFinder
Estee Lauder
Evergage
Fidelity Investments
FIS
Fiserv
FlightScope
ForeverCar
Formativ Health
Foxwoods Resort Casino
Geisinger Health
Generali Global Assistance
George P. Johnson
GL group
Globalization Partners
Glossive Technologies
GN Hearing
Gorilla Safety
GREAT WINE Inc.
Gregory FCA
GuideWell Connect
Hannaford Supermarkets
HCL America Inc. - Ritesh Jain
Health4TheWorld
Heraeus Incorporated
Hire For Hope LLC
HMS
HomeServe USA
IGEL
Ignite Sales
IGT
InfinityQS International
Information Builders
Intel Corporation
International SOS
Invesco
ISG
Jefferson County in Golden CO
John Hancock Financial Services
JVZoo
Karmic Labs Inc.
Keriton
LanguageLine Solutions
Lightcast.com
Lighthouse Worldwide Solutions
Lycored
Makers Nutrition
Makovsky
Marriott International
MDwise
Mercedes-Benz USA
Merck
Meritor
Merkle
MetTel
MONAT Global
Motus
Movember Foundation
Mphasis
NBCU
nCino
NFL Player Benefits Office
Nutrisystem
Oncor Electric
OptumCare Operations
Outreach Process Partners LLC
Pacific Expeditors
PAIRELATIONS LLC
PAN Communications
Panasonic Automotive
Panda Restaurant Group
Parkmobile
Paychex Inc.
Port It Global Inc
Primrose Schools
Progrexion
Public Employees' Benefits Program
QLess Inc.
Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems
RB
Realtor.com
Relic
Revenue Optimization Companies, The
Roth Staffing Companies L.P.
Safeguard Business Systems Inc. Dallas TX
SamsonPR
Scaffidi Restaurant Group
SCAN Healthplan
Scott Hospes
Shade Tree Auto
Sharpen Technologies
Social Finance Inc
SoftPro
Soleo Health
Spark
SparkPR
Spartan Invest
State Street Corp
Sterling Staffing Solutions
STYLE Advertising
Symantec
T and T Consulting Services Inc.
T. H. Easter Consulting LLC
TCS
TekLeaders
Terra Dotta
TGI Fridays
Thomson Reuters
Toshiba America Business Solutions
Transfermate
Trianz
TriNet
TrustLogics
Truth Initiative
TycoonAdvertisingGroup
U.S. Army Headquarters Installation Management Command
UBS
United Educators
United Way Worldwide
UnitedHealthcare
Upsher-Smith Laboratories
Valley Forge Fabrics
Vanguard
Verizon
WebPT
Worldwide Clinical Trials
Xperiel Inc.

Quest Software is the top winner in the 2018 People's Choice Stevie® Awards for Favorite New Products, a feature of The American Business Awards®, the U.S.A.’s top business awards program, which are now in their 16th year.

The worldwide public vote was conducted last month, with the highest number of votes deciding the winners in a variety of product categories. More than 58,000 votes were cast.  To win, a category’s leading vote-getter had to have received at least 100 votes.

Quest, the Aliso Viejo, CA software developer won People’s Choice Stevie Awards in three categories, Cloud Applications/Services, Governance/Risk/Compliance Solutions, and Software – Other.

LIMU LEAN Protein Shake Mix collected the most votes of any nominee.

The crystal People’s Choice Stevie Awards will be presented to winners at The American Business Awards’ banquet on Monday, June 11 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. There, the winners of peer-adjudicated Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Awards will also be presented their awards.
More than 650 executives from across the USA will attend.

All new products and services nominated in the new product awards categories of this year’s American Business Awards were eligible to be included in voting for the people’s choice awards.

The winners of the 2018 People’s Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite New Products are:

AI/Machine Learning Solutions: Digital Air Strike's Response Path
B2B Products: Samsara's Vehicle IoT Gateway
B2B Services: T. H. Easter Consulting's Women's Executive Development Program
Business/Competitive Intelligence Solutions: vXchnge in\site
Cloud Applications/Services: Quest On Demand
Cloud Infrastructure/Platform: Jive Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud Storage/Backup: Sungard AS Cloud Recovery - AWS
Consumer Electronics: Hisense Laser TV
Consumer Products: LIMU LEAN Protein Shake Mix
Content Solutions: Thomson Reuters’ Checkpoint Catalyst:  US GAAP - Revenue Recognition Tools
Corporate Learning/Workforce Development Solutions: Pluralsight IQ
Data Visualization Technology: PRO Unlimited’s Wand Discovery Total Talent Solutions
DevOps Solutions: DBmaestro's Database DevOps Platform
Education Solutions: Arise Virtual Solutions' Limitless Learning
Electronic Commerce Solutions: BluePay Gateway
Financial Services: John Hancock Signature Services LIDS UP Program
FinTech Solutions: Digital Disbursements from Fiserv
Governance/Risk/Compliance Solutions: Quest Enterprise Reporter Suite
Hardware – Storage: Apricorn's Aegis Secure Key 3z / Aegis Configurator
Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Products & Services: I Am Enough, LLC - Rapid Transformational Therapy Methodology
Human Capital Management Solutions: Asure Software's HCM
Identity & Access Security Solutions: IdentityForce’s Social Media Identity Monitoring Suite
Insurance Solutions: BenefitMall CRQS with Payroll
Integration Solutions: John Hancock Financial Services Returned Mail and Address Change Automation
Marketing/Public Relations Solutions: Digital Air Strike Response Logix 4.0
Mobile On-Demand Applications: Gorilla Safety 2.0
Payments Solutions: BluePay Gateway
Software – Other: Quest Change Auditor
Software Development Solutions: Intetics TETRA
Telecommunications: Nextivity’s Cel-Fi QUATRA In-Building Enterprise Cellular System
Transportation: SmartDrive Transportation Intelligence Platform

Sponsors of The 2018 American Business Awards include HCL America, John Hancock Signature Services and SoftPro.

The Stevie® Awards announced today the Grand Stevie Award winners in The 16th Annual American Business Awards^® competition. Winners will be presented their Grand Stevie Awards trophies at the ABA’s gala banquet on June 11 in New York.

FIS, the Jacksonville, FL-based leader in financial services technology, will be presented the Grand Stevie Award for Most Honored Organization of the Year. FIS earned 70 award points, more than any other entrant. Stevie Award-winning organizations are accorded three points for each Gold Stevie win, two points per Silver Stevie win, and one-and-a-half points for each Bronze Stevie win.

10Fold Communications, with offices in San Francisco, the Bay Area, Southern California, Texas, and Colorado, has won the Grand Stevie for Most Honored PR Agency of the Year with 29 points earned on behalf of clients including Agiloft, Attack IQ, and Versa, among others.

Other top ABA Grand Stevie winners include George P. Johnson Experience Marketing (Auburn Hills, MI) for Most Honored Interactive Agency of the Year with 21.5 points and Merkle (Columbia, MD) for Most Honored Marketing Agency of the Year with 18.5 points.

Grand Stevies were also awarded to the 10 other organizations with the most points in the 2018 competition.

The Top 10 winners are:

1. PAIRELATIONS, Centennial, CO, on behalf of clients including Audigy, Beltone, Formativ Health, GN ReSound, Gorilla Safety, Soleo Health, and TekLeaders (48.5)
2. Reltio, Redwood Shores, CA (38)
3. Jeunesse Global, Orlando, FL (27.5)
4. Makers Nutrition, Hauppauge, NY (21)
5. Cisco Systems, nationwide (20.5)

6. (tie) Aflac, Columbus, GA (18)
          John Hancock Signature Services, Boston, MA (18)
7. (tie) Franklin Covey, Salt Lake City, UT (16.5)
           PAN Communications, with offices in Boston, New York, Orlando, and San Francisco (16.5)
            TopSpot, Houston, TX (16.5)

All organizations operating in the U.S.– large and small, public and private, for-profit and non-profit—are eligible to submit nominations to the ABAs in a wide range of categories, honoring achievement in every aspect of work life, from customer service and management to public relations and product development. More than 3,700 nominations submitted to the 2018 competition were reviewed and rated in the judging process by more than 200 professionals, whose average scores determined the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners who were announced earlier this month. The June 11 awards presentations will be broadcast live via Livestream.

For a complete list of the 2018 Stevie Award winners, visit http://www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

Sponsors of The 2018 American Business Awards include HCL America, John Hancock Signature Services, and SoftPro.

The Stevie® Awards, organizers of the world’s premier business awards programs, today announced the Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie winners in The 16th Annual American Business Awards®.

All organizations operating in the U.S.A. – large and small, public and private, for-profit and non-profit - are eligible to submit nominations to the ABAs in a wide range of categories, honoring achievement in every aspect of work life, from customer service and management to public relations and product development. More than 3,700 nominations were reviewed in the judging process this year by more than 200 professionals, whose average scores determined the winners.

For a complete list of the Stevie Award winners announced today, visit http://www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

2018 Stevie winners will be celebrated and presented their awards during a gala event on Monday, June 11 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York. Tickets are now on sale. The presentations will be broadcast live via Livestream.

Top winners of Gold Stevies, with three or more each, include Aeye (Pleasonton, CA), Aflac (Columbus, GA), Age of Learning (Glendale, CA), Anthem Foundation (Indianapolis, IN), Blue Wheel Media (Birmingham, MI), FIS (Jacksonville, FL), George P Johnson Experiential Marketing (Auburn Hills, MI), GN Hearing, (Bloomington, MN), GOLD PR (Irvine, CA), Gorilla Safety (Houston, TX), GTT Communications (McLean, VA), I Am Enough (Marina Del Ray, CA), Jeunesse Global (Orlando, FL), John Hancock Financial Services (Boston, MA), Marriott Vacations Worldwide (Orlando, FL), Petplan (Newtown Square, PA), Reltio (Redwood Shores, CA), Rentec Direct (Grants Pass, OR), Rimini Street (Las Vegas, NV), TopSpot (Houston, TX), Vectra (San Jose, CA) and Zenni Optical (Novato, CA).

Among all other Stevie winners, those winning five or more awards include 3D Exhibits (Schaumburg, IL), Accenture (Chicago, IL), ADP (Roseland, NJ), BMO Capital Markets (Chicago, IL), Brighton Health Plan Solutions (New York, NY), Cisco Systems Inc. (San Jose, CA), DCR Workforce (Boca Raton, FL), EMI Strategic Marketing (Boston, MA), Entercom (New York, NY), Franklin Covey (Salt Lake City, UT), HomeServe USA (Norwalk, CT), LABOV Marketing Communications and Training (Fort Wayne, IN), Makers Nutrition (Hauppauge, NY), Marketing Mojo (Charlottesville, VA), Merkle (Columbia, MD), MWWPR (New York, NY), New American Funding (Tustin, CA), Pacific Life Insurance Co. (Newport Beach, CA), Quest Software (Aliso Viejo, CA), SoftPro (Raleigh, NC), Spark Growth (New York, NY), STYLE Advertising (Birmingham, AL), Tata Consultancy Services (New York, NY), TekLeaders (Plano, TX), Thomson Reuters (Stamford, CT), WebPT (Phoenix, AZ) and Wolters Kluwer (New York, NY).

HCL America, part of HCL Technologies, a $7.4 billion global company that helps global enterprises reimagine their businesses for the digital age, sponsored the HCL Reimagining Business for the Digital Age awards, in 13 bespoke categories.  Stevie winners in these categories include Allscripts (Chicago, IL), BD (Franklin Lakes, NJ), Citi (New York, NY), Cummins Inc. (Columbus, IN), Deloitte (New York, NY), Merck & Co. (Kenilworth, NJ), Oncor (Dallas, TX), Symantec (Mountain View, CA), The Vanguard Group (Valley Forge, PA) and Verizon (New York, NY), among others.

Every new product or service nominated in The 2018 American Business Awards is included in voting for the People's Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite New Products, a worldwide public vote. Voting is now open at http://peopleschoice.stevieawards.com and will conclude on June 1. People’s Choice Stevie winners will be announced the week of June 4, and will be honored during the June 11 presentations.

“The nominations submitted for The 2018 American Business Awards were outstanding.  The competition was intense, and those recognized as Stevie Award winners should be immensely proud of this accomplishment,” said Michael Gallagher, president and founder of the Stevie Awards.

Trade shows and conferences can be great opportunities for businesses to meet prospects—but they can also be crowded places where exhibitors find themselves in competition with hundreds or even thousands of other companies to catch the eye of attendees.

That’s why many exhibitors hire experts like Live Marketing, a U.S. firm that specializes in creating memorable experiences. For example, a food ingredient developer enlisted them when it sought to create a buzz around its newest solutions at an important industry event. Live Marketing’s answer: RFID sensors to trigger an interactive, multi-screen display when guests “pick and place” various food items, a novel approach that helped the client exceed its lead-generation goal.

For a medical device maker, the team created a unique conference display featuring a glass-encased laboratory dotted with scannable hotspots that let the visitor experience its products firsthand. Each interaction prompted a brief video or augmented reality sequence, resulting in an immersive tour through the lab.

Underpinning those examples, and many other projects, is a reliance on technology to push the boundaries of what a live corporate event can be. It’s an approach that Anne Trompeter, then a 10-year veteran of the Chicago-area firm, brought to the forefront when she bought Live Marketing in 2014.

The organization has long had a prominent position within the world of corporate events. Launched in the 1970s, the agency was a pioneer in the experiential marketing industry. It was the brain trust that helped introduce the Intel Pentium processor and the world’s first flip phone to the marketplace.

When she took the reins four years ago, Trompeter’s goal was to make sure the firm didn’t grow stale. “I bought Live Marketing from its original founder with a clear vision to reinvigorate and refresh the company to be relevant for today’s sophisticated experiential marketing and technology-activated approaches,” she says.

In a short period of time, she’s helped make that vision a reality. The company has won numerous industry awards for its innovative, tech-based exhibits, and Trompeter recently garnered the Silver Stevie® award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in The 2017 American Business Awards.

A Team Effort

Breathing new life into the agency hasn’t been a solo task, something Trompeter readily acknowledges.

One of the changes she made early on was to get the most out of what she saw as untapped potential within the staff. “I’ve shifted our creative process so we are all challenged to bring in new engagement ideas on a regular basis,” she explains.

She’s also put a premium on helping employees grow, either within their role or in new positions. In one instance, a member of the marketing team expressed an interest in being a producer, a job with which she had little experience. Not wanting to lose one of her valued employees, Trompeter helped ease her into the new role over a period of 18 months. “By mid-2017, she was full-time producer and is very happy and productive,” the executive says.

In another instance, the executive leveraged an employee’s degree in theater management by moving him up into a production role. Once an assistant to Trompeter, he’s now a full-time creative director with a roster of his own clients for which he writes and develops concepts.

“I consider it an achievement to cultivate the very best team who feels appreciated and able to do their finest work at all times,” she says. “The way I do that is listening to my team members and making adjustments based on what I’m hearing.”

As if running a top-tier events marketing firm isn’t challenging enough, Trompeter does it while juggling a litany of other roles. Among them: parent, church choir member, and triathlete.

Rather than detracting from her business responsibilities, she says those outside endeavors help keep her energized. “Training for races and triathlons plus my overall commitment to fitness keeps me physically and mentally healthy,” she says. “I apply that same focus and drive to my business. But I recognize the importance of a healthy work-life balance, not just for me, but for everyone on my team.”

A breast cancer survivor, Trompeter uses her professional success to support cancer research and other philanthropic causes and encourages her employees to perform charitable work as well. “Several employees suggested giving back more specifically to the communities where our offices are located,” she says. “So beginning last year, each office identifies and does two hands-on charitable give-backs, like serving in local soup kitchens and doing food distribution.”

“In 2018, our theme is ‘Get Engaged’,” says Trompeter. “I feel strongly that now more than ever we have a responsibility to be civic-minded. Getting more involved in our communities’ neediest populations is an immediate and personalized way to get engaged.”