text:
Enterprising students at The University of Texas at Austin are learning the ropes in Rob Adams’ New Venture Creation class. Pioneering start-ups tap into student talent by applying to the TVL Accelerator program at the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs. And aspiring founders from both inside and outside the university participate in the twice-yearly Shark Tank-style TVL Investment Competition.
Distilling Wild Sotol in Texas
His uncle raved about it. He said it’d be memorable. And for Judson Kauffman, MBA ’17, his first sip of moonshine certainly was. Kauffman’s a sixth-generation Texan from Longview, and if you do the math, that means his family’s been here about as long as there’s been a Lone Star on the flag. And for as long as he can remember, his family’s been trekking across the state to hunt in Fort Stockton.
To hunt, yes, and to indulge in the local brew as well.
Fast forward 20 years. Kauffman is now a former Navy SEAL and a managing partner at consulting firm Exbellum, a boutique management consulting firm in Austin. Still, he says, he wanted to make himself “more agile.”
So in 2015, Kauffman enrolled in the Texas Executive MBA Program. He registered for the New Venture Creation class taught by Rob Adams, director of the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs.
TVL draws in graduate students from many fields, from business to engineering to law. Some students take part in the TVL Accelerator, earning credit as unpaid consultants to Austin startups. Other students, like Kauffman, pursue their own entrepreneurial aspirations by working in teams to develop a business plan.
And it was during one of his team’s brainstorming sessions that he thought back to that West Texas hooch, hidden in garages and sheds, made from a spiny plant called sotol, or “desert spoon.” Sotol grows wild in the Southwest, and once distilled, it invites comparison to bourbon, tequila, mescal, and cognac simultaneously. Problem is, it’s only distilled in Mexico.
Or maybe it wasn’t a problem. Why not create the nation’s only sotol distillery right here in Central Texas? asked Kauffman. His team was in.
“This is where they get to see what an entrepreneur goes through,” says Luis Martins, chairman of the McCombs Management Department, which houses TVL. “They meet reality.”
By the end of the course, teams test out their ideas on other classmates, then each team presents to local investors who help grade the projects. Kauffman’s team got a big shot of confidence when an investor told them to keep going. “If you do,” he said, “I would like to invest.”
Adams also encouraged them to pitch the idea, Shark Tank-style, to entrepreneurs and investors as part of the TVL Investment Competition. “That forced us to apply some rigor,” Kauffman admits. “We were full of assumptions that hadn’t been vetted yet.”
Knowing they’d need access to the desert plant, team members drove to West Texas to meet with landowners. They also spoke to Austin retailers, restaurateurs, and bar owners who were enthusiastic at the prospect of being among the first to sell sotol locally.
And that’s what Adams teaches. He tells his students to call 100 possible customers to avoid sinking time and money into a product no one wants. They have to do “good, old-fashioned outreach” on the phone or face-to-face, Adams insists. No email surveys. “You really have to get personal.” Kauffman’s team won third place in the fall 2016 TVL competition. They received a $2,000 prize and picked up investors, raising enough capital to build a state-of-the-art distillery and cover 18 months of operating costs.
Adams believes he’ll soon be toasting Kauffman and his co-founders, fellow New Venture Creation classmates and military veterans Brent Looby and Ryan Campbell, both MBA ’17. “I would bet on those guys 100 percent,” Adams boasts.
The three call their company Desert Door. They’ve opened a distillery in Driftwood and plan to trot out the first bottles of the smooth, herbaceous liquor in time for the holidays this year.
Full-Service App for Online Retailers
Sometimes, your first lofty idea isn’t the one that flies. Just ask Naruby Schlenker, MBA ’10, head of business development for the successful seven-year-old venture Ordoro.
Born in McCombs’ New Venture Creation class, Ordoro initially planned to offer a web tool for small- and medium-size online retailers to optimize their inventory. The platform allowed customers to know how many items were on their shelves and when to restock. They’d also avoid wasteful overstocking.
But when the team followed Adams’ 100-call rule, the students were stunned that they didn’t get any interest from potential customers.
“It turned out that one of the biggest problems these companies had was printing shipping labels,” Schlenker explains. “We realized the needs were much more basic than we thought they were. Once we figured it out, we knew we had to solve those problems first.”
The team came back with an app to manage all of the back-office activity after each online sale. Ordoro placed in the top five ventures in the 2010 semi-finals for Moot Corp, the predecessor to the TVL investment competition.
“By the time we graduated in 2010, we were starting to build the actual software,” Schlenker says. Ordoro’s software simplifies functions so customers no longer have to use multiple sites to print labels, send packages, track shipments, and organize data for every order. And, yes, managing inventory — a critical function — is built in, including alerts to reorder supplies.
Still, Schlenker had a hard choice to make when Johnson & Johnson offered her a job. She had interned with the company as an MBA student, and before she enrolled at McCombs, had worked six years for another corporate giant, Eli Lilly, including a stint in her native Venezuela.
But for Schlenker, the chance to launch a business with two talented classmates proved irresistible, even if they’d have to forgo salaries the first year. “We all turned down offers,” she says of her teammates and co-founders, CEO Jagath Narayan, and Marketing and Sales Head Sangram Kadam.
Soon after the partners graduated, Ordoro was accepted into the TVL Accelerator, entitling it to help from student-consultants. Today, the co-founders give back to the center that brought them together, speaking to classes and judging competitions.
“If we hadn’t called those 100 online retailers, we would still be developing an inventory tool that no one wants,” she says. But they did call, and today, Ordoro has raised $4.75 million and has 17 employees.
CO² Recapture Technology for Small-Scale Customers
Amy George, MBA ’00, began her career in marketing for a pioneering architect in green-building technology. She was inspired.
“I started looking at sustainability as a lens for business,” she says. It’s through that lens that George has defined her career path.
She enrolled at McCombs in 1998, studying management and entrepreneurship. Afterward, she worked for seven years at Pavilion Technologies, which helps major multinationals decrease their energy footprint while at the same time increasing their productivity.
In 2008, George and MBA ’00 classmate Melissa Nathan, along with Nathan’s sister Paige Davis, created BlueAvocado. The award-winning company makes reusable storage bags to replace the plastic throwaways typically used for sandwiches and other everyday items.
George was president and CEO until last year when she stepped down, took a seat on the board, and leapt into her newest and possibly most ambitious venture: founding Earthly Labs, which is laying the groundwork to capture and recycle carbon dioxide emissions for small businesses and residential customers.
“I revisited my tech roots at Pavilion,” she says, “and wanted to solve one of the most pressing problems of our time.”
Large-scale CO² emitters have access to recapture technologies, but for smaller customers, not so much. She applied for student consulting help through the TVL Accelerator, and this spring, “a really cool” group of grad students in business, pharmacy, physics, and law teamed up to act as Earthly’s advisers.
The students helped assess the market, devise incentives, and identify a big potential funder. They “refined Earthly’s approach and accelerated the timeline,” George explains.
She recently began pilot recapture projects with breweries that use and expel CO², a major contributor to greenhouse gases. Once Earthly purifies the gas, the brewers can reuse it to make future beer batches. George wants to expand into the residential market because homes emit CO² when using natural gas and electricity. The plan is for Earthly to pay home- owners for the CO² it recaptures and then sell it to larger customers.
“I have kids, and the things I’m doing now affect the future they will inherit,” she says.
Developing Alternatives to Opioid Painkillers
Overdose deaths from opioids have reached record highs, and federal and state lawmakers are casting a critical eye on painkiller prescriptions. The race is on to develop alternatives that are non-habit-forming.
Doug Baum, CEO at Vindolor Pharmaceuticals, is in the chase.
Baum, BBA ’90, MSTC ’07, has partnered with researchers at UT Health San Antonio who are formulating new non-addictive painkillers. Vindolor plans to license two of the medications in development, one of which is already in clinical trials, Baum says. Prior to co-founding Vindolor earlier this year, he served on pharma company boards and was president and CEO of Austin-based Xeris Pharmaceuticals for four years. He’s been involved in drug development since 1991.
While a master’s student at McCombs, his team won the Moot Corp competition in 2007 with another company he co-founded, MacuCLEAR, which develops medications to treat macular degeneration.
Earlier this year, Baum sought help from the TVL Accelerator. The graduate student consultant team assigned to him conducted market research and validation. Their financial projections estimated a $200 million market for the two drugs, Baum says. “They helped an entrepreneur and a company of one person do a lot of work over a relatively short period of time,” he says.
Computer Vision for Retailers
What motivates shoppers to buy the things they buy? Why are they drawn to one display but ignore another? And how can retailers make shopping more satisfying?
Arming brick-and-mortar retailers with insights into shoppers’ behavior is the goal of eyeQ, an Austin startup founded by Michael Garel, MBA ’12.
Before enrolling at McCombs, Garel worked for nearly a decade at Dell as a mechanical development engineer and then went to Xplore, a maker of rugged computer tablets. It was there that the entrepreneurial bug bit.
Garel wanted to create a company that uses computer vision, enabling machines to “see” and analyze information from images. He was taking Adams’ New Venture Creation course when he wrote the business plan for eyeQ.
After talking to retailers, Garel discovered they loved the idea of using artificial intelligence to gain insights into shoppers’ behavior — but they weren’t willing to pay for it.
So, he kept the idea of collecting data on customers as they interacted with displays, but downgraded the sophistication of the data-gathering. Instead of using a computer with artificial intelligence, he created a low-cost ($75) battery-powered device with a variety of sensors to compile simple information about shoppers, including age, gender, and purchasing behavior — all while protecting the person’s anonymity.
Retailers can use the data to determine whether a display is in the right place and attracting the shoppers they want. With eyeQ in place, Garel says clients are seeing increased sales and shopper engagement.
“We’re working with a brand right now that’s testing two different displays,” he says. “They’re trying to decide whether they can justify spending the $1 million it will take to go to the next level and employ artificial intelligence.”
Garel is no stranger to TVL. Five years ago, his eyeQ team won the competition. And with help from student-consultants in 2012 and again this year, the company has raised $3.2 million from investors. In its most recent go- round as a TVL Accelerator firm, eyeQ learned how much retailers spend on market research so it could price its product competitively.
Cutting Edge Gamer
Graphics Card Leasing Program Offers Big Benefits
For serious gamers, realism and speed matter. A lot.
“They want the latest and greatest way to play,” says James Walsh, MBA ’05, co-founder and president of Cutting Edge Gamer. But new graphics cards that can translate computer pixels into realistic images for fast-paced 3D games come out often, and they’re expensive. Walsh’s solution? Lease the cards instead.
Gamers can pay a small monthly fee with the option to buy the graphics card at the end of a 12-month contract. It winds up costing the customer more in the end than an outright purchase would, but the leasing option gives gamers two big benefits. First, says Walsh, the upfront expense of buying a graphics card can be too much for some. Monthly installments make the cost manageable. Second, and just as important, Walsh’s company allows members to swap their cards for an upgrade — and a new lease — as better technology becomes available.
Customers seem to like the approach: Business has doubled since 2014, and Walsh admits they’ve got more demand than they can meet.
“Cutting Edge Gamer offers a great, affordable option for staying on the edge of the technology,” says Harlan Beverly, TVL’s assistant director. Beverly, who founded gaming hardware and software firm BigFoot Networks in 2005, now serves as one of Cutting Edge Gamer’s advisers. That means Beverly has had to recuse himself from TVL activities that involve the graphics card company, but even so, it’s not unusual for TVL faculty to work with students after they graduate from McCombs, he explains. “It’s part of what sets TVL apart from similar centers at other universities.”
Earlier this year, Cutting Edge Gamer was selected for the TVL Accelerator, where a team of six UT students was tasked with identifying ways to finance the company’s inventory, a longstanding problem.
“Typically, banks won’t lend to us,” Walsh acknowledges. So, the students vetted other options, including equipment financing firms — some of which said yes.
“That’s huge,” he insists. “This year we’re raising a million in new capital, thanks in large part to McCombs and TVL.”
From the Fall 2017 issue of McCombs, the magazine for alumni and friends of the McCombs School of Business.


text:
BERLIN, Oct 26 (Reuters) – Germany laid out plans to legalize marijuana on Wednesday, a move promised by the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz that would make it the first in Europe to legalize marijuana one of the countries.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has presented a foundational document on planned legislation to regulate adults’ controlled distribution and consumption of marijuana for recreational purposes.
The acquisition and possession of up to 20 to 30 grams of recreational marijuana for personal consumption will also be legalized.
The coalition government struck a deal last year to introduce legislation during its four-year term to allow controlled distribution of cannabis in licensed stores.
Lauterbach did not give a timetable for the plan, which would make Germany the second EU country after Malta to legalize marijuana.
Many European countries, including Germany, have legalized cannabis for limited medicinal purposes. The use of cannabis for medical purposes has been legal in Germany since 2017. Others have legalized it for general use, but not legalized it.
According to the document, private practice will be allowed to a limited extent. Ongoing investigations and criminal proceedings related to cases that are no longer illegal will be terminated.
The government also plans to introduce a special excise tax, as well as education and prevention efforts related to cannabis.
A survey last year found that legalizing marijuana could bring Germany about 4.7 billion euros ($4.7 billion) in annual tax and cost savings and create 27,000 new jobs.
About 4 million people in Germany consumed marijuana last year, 25 percent of whom were between the ages of 18 and 24, Lauterbach said, adding that legalization would crowd out the black market.
The minister added that Germany will submit the document to the European Commission for a pre-assessment and that a law will be drafted only after the commission has approved it.
The decision has already sparked various reactions in Europe’s largest economy.
The German Pharmacists’ Association has warned about the health risks of legalizing marijuana, saying it would throw pharmacies into medical conflict.
Pharmacists are healthcare professionals, so “the possible competitive situation with purely commercial suppliers has been particularly criticized,” Thomas Preis, head of the North Rhine Pharmacists Association, told the Rheinische Post.
The legalization plan has not been welcomed by all federal states. For example, the Bavarian health minister has warned that Germany should not become a European destination for drug tourism.
The Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper quoted Bavarian Health Minister Klaus Holleček as saying: “Consumption carries significant and sometimes irreversible health and social risks – triviality of any kind is completely irresponsible. .”
But Germany’s Green Party said decades of banning cannabis would only exacerbate the risks, adding that legal trade would better protect youth and health. “Because the restrictions on the legal market are too restrictive, it will only facilitate the entry of particularly strong cannabis into the black market,” lawmaker Kirsten Kappert-Gonther said on Wednesday.
Lars Mueller, chief executive of German cannabis company SynBiotic, said Wednesday’s move was “almost like winning the lottery” for his company.
“When the time comes, we’ll be able to offer a franchise-like model for cannabis stores in addition to our own stores,” Mueller said.
(1 USD = 0.9995 EUR)
Reporting by Riham Alkousaa, Editing by Rachel More and Miranda Murray
Our Standard: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

domain: news


text:
BERLIN: German startup Vibrosonic has developed a unique hearing aid, dubbed the “contact lens for hearing.”
The device has been developed jointly by the University of Tبنbingen in Germany and the Fraunhafer Institute for Manufacturing, Engineering and Automation, while a startup company called Vibrosonic has been set up to deliver it to consumers.
The device is named “Alpha” for sale. Unlike the usual hearing aid, the Alpha Hearing Aid has a tiny speaker that is placed very close to the eardrum.
The outside of the device vibrates the speaker, transmitting the surrounding sounds to the inside. This vibration creates vibrations directly in the eardrum, making it easier for the user to hear.
According to a press release from the Fraunhafer Institute, this hearing aid is far better and more effective than the usual hearing aid.
This does not seem to be much different from traditional hearing aids. It has a battery mounted on the outside which is worn on the ear.
A thin wire coming out of it reaches inside the ear canal with a “piezoelectric speaker” installed at the front end.
This is a special kind of speaker that vibrates in a certain way at voltage fluctuations.
The outer part of the hearing aid converts the surrounding sounds into electrical signals and sends them to the inner speaker, which vibrates according to the same signals (voltage drop).
This vibration is immediately transmitted to the eardrum, which reaches the brain and creates a sense of hearing in the wearer.
Although the “Alpha” is very safe and does not require any operation to wear, unlike the normal hearing aid, it cannot be taken off once worn.
The prototype of the device was developed in 2019 and has been improved over the past two years.
With its existing “Alpha” design, the device not only reduces unnecessary noise and ensures better hearing, but also covers all frequencies from 80 Hz to 12 kHz, which a normal human ear can hear. Can
Vibrosonic has applied to the relevant European bodies for approval of “Alpha”, which is expected to be approved by September or October 2021.
Only then will the price of the “Alpha” be announced, which could be as high as or more expensive than a high-quality hearing aid.
Vibrosonic says that the existing hearing aid is being further improved, which will be made so small that the entire system of the device will fit into the ear canal


text:
Staff complacency is among the biggest threats to an organisation's cyber-security, a new study has found.
A major corporate breach can spell disaster for companies which risk losing personal and customer data or hard-won intellectual property, as well as facing disruption and distrust for the business. As such, it is no surprise to see that cyber-security is beginning take predominance in boardrooms across the country, however, the dangers may sometimes be closer to home.
The Digital Development Index study, which was conducted by Barclays, ranked the UK ninth in a survey of 10 countries, behind Brazil, China and South Africa, when it came to cyber-security. One of the most notable extracts of data obtained was that the main struggle was not just warding off criminals, but uneducated or complacent staff.
According to the Financial Times, many staff members are not familiar or confident when it comes to cyber-defence, or worse still, simply do not care. British workers in particular were found to inadequately protect their devices and data.
Barclays stated that the lack of digital skills in the UK left businesses and individuals significantly vulnerable. Some 13% used password-generating software, whereas 32% did so in China and India.
Additionally, only 41% changed important passwords regularly and the majority of respondents were found to have stored payment information on websites they frequently use.
"Productivity and convenience are put above security," Chris Dye, a vice-president at UK-based cyber-security company Glasswall Solutions stated. "The feeling is that people need to be connected all the time, so companies open up access to [personal] devices."
In research by Glasswall, 87% of FTSE 100 firms surveyed identified cyber security as "a principal risk"-- yet many fail to explain to staff the vital role they play in keeping the company safe, Dye said.
"What people will open and how they think of documents from both known and unknown sources is absolutely alarming," Dye added. He explained that many deem an email is safe if it has been through the corporate firewall when quite often it is not.
For Rob Horton, senior product manager of NetReveal, an anti-fraud platform belonging to BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, security must be built-in in order to be effective. He said: "Security by design involves everybody making sure they are working securely, whatever role in the company they have. Whether an employee is working with a customer, delivering a service or writing code in an application, there needs to be accountability."
© Copyright 2017, Misco UK Limited, registered in Scotland,
Registered office address: Caledonian Exchange, 19a Canning Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8HE.
Registered number: SC114143.
VAT number: 494175615.
MISCO is a registered trademark of HUK 78 LIMITED. All others trademarks and copyrights mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
All prices mentioned (pounds) exclude postage and packaging. All orders comply to Misco terms and conditions.


text:
CPP Expo Solidifies 2007 Plans for Expansion in Las Vegas
PARAMUS, N.J.—H.A. Bruno, LLC, organizers of CPP EXPO, have announced that the show will continue to expand its size and offerings with confirmed dates and location for 2007. The event will co-locate with PACK EXPO Las Vegas and PROCESS EXPO (the re-formatted event launched due to the merging of IAFIS and FPMA trade associations) over the dates of October 15-17, 2007. The global trend of co-location of converting, package printing, packaging and processing solutions in one venue, under one roof will be demonstrated as never before.


text:
The BSE Sensex and NSE Nifty are closed for trading today i.e. May 13 on account of Id-Ul-Fitr or Ramzan Eid. Eid ul-Fitr is celebrated by Muslims worldwide to mark the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. The commodities and currency markets will also remain closed for Id-Ul-Fitra.
Meanwhile, on the economy front, retail inflation eased to 4.29 per cent in April 2021 owing to a drop in food prices, government data released post market hours on Wednesday showed.
Overnight, the U.S stocks suffered the biggest slump in at least 11 weeks on Wednesday and benchmark Treasury yields jumped after data showed consumer prices in April unexpectedly rose by the highest level in nearly 12 years. The Dow Jones shed 2 per cent, the S&P 500 dropped 2.1 per cent and Nasdaq Composite lost 2.7 per cent.
The domestic benchmark indices had declined for the second consecutive session on Wednesday, with the Sensex ending lower by 471 points or one per cent and Nifty declining 154 points to settle at 14,696.


text:
TAMPA — By the end of the 2026, Joe Lopano wants Tampa International Airport to function as its own little city.
By then, airport officials would have spent more than $2 billion on improvements and new amenities in the terminals and around the airport property as part of a master plan overhaul. The airport would become the landlord not only of nearby International Plaza, which sits on airport-owned land, but also to a host of hotels and office buildings, retailers and restaurants even closer to the terminals.
Travelers will be able to work from airport property, if they want to lease an office space there. They can dine or shop at restaurants and retail stores, gas up at a new gas station, and walk down the pedestrian trails back to one of two hotels. You'll never have to leave the airport's 17-acre enclave, which will offer all the amenities of a mall or business district.
Through the next phase of its master plan, the Tampa airport is getting deeper into the real estate development business. It's a trend that airports and ports, like Port Tampa Bay, have been exploring for years. By developing and leasing out desirable lots of land for commercial uses, these transportation agencies are creating new and longterm revenue streams."What you're witnessing is the evolution of the airport model," said Lopano, the CEO of the Tampa airport. "When we were just a parking lot for airplanes, planes served food so travelers didn't have a need for that in the airport. Now we're a mini mall that offers plane departures. This is the next evolution of that — this is land that's not needed for aviation purposes but can used for something else to create new revenue."
The centerpiece of the $543 million phase two of Tampa International Airport's master plan is a 17-acre commercial development officials are calling the "Gateway" area, which includes plans for up to two hotels, an eight-story, 240,000-square-foot office building, a 20,000-square-foot retail strip and a gas station with a convenience store. It will be located next to the economy parking garage and accessible to the main terminal through the airport's people mover train, which will be completed later this year.
Some of that office space will be leased back to the aviation authority and its employees. But the airport plans to hire a developer to build it, then lease space to office, retail and restaurant tenants, maybe even a pet hotel. It's not clear yet which hotel chains might be interested in coming to the airport.
"This creates new opportunities for us," Lopano said. "We're always looking for ways to expand our revenue base beyond just one thing. Right now we have strong revenue in parking fees, rental car fees, food, beverage and retail. And soon, more real estate."
Follow trends affecting the local economy
Subscribe to our free Business by the Bay newsletter
You’re all signed up!
Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.Explore all your options
Analysts say it's a natural transition for airports to lease and develop land they own because more traditional revenue streams are strained or limited. Lopano has been vocal about encouraging Congress to raise the passenger facility charge, a user fee that travelers pay when flying in or out of a specific airport, and airports in turn put toward projects and improvements. Local aviation authority boards decide how high a fee to place on passengers, but currently cannot exceed the $4.50 cap. Both TIA and St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport have maxed out PFC fees at $4.50 per passenger.
"They have to get into the development business. Airport are economic generators that have all this land. It's the perfect place for this kind of investment and often attracts businesses to the region," said Michael Boyd, with Boyd Group International, an aviation consulting firm in Colorado. "Historically business has grown up around airports, but it's always been passive. Now airports want a piece of this action. Nearly every airport has a development plan these days."
Flagstaff Pulliam Airport in Arizona recently agreed to sell 32 acres of land to a Chinese hotel developer, which will build a hotel, conference center, and its U.S. corporate headquarters there. Not far from the Golden Triangle Regional Airport in Mississippi, Japanese Yokohama Tire opened a $300 million factory.
"Throughout the world there are very successful examples of this," Lopano said. "It's quite dependent on much land you have. In Dallas (where he worked previously) we had 18,000 acres of land. That helped bring commercial warehousing and car dealerships who would rent the land from the airport, which was close to the highway."
Lopano says that the Tampa airport has similar appeal. That's what drew James Judge, a public relations specialist to move his offices there in November. He leases space through the Tampa Airport Marriott, which he said was far more affordable than downtown Tampa and other office hot spots in the region.
"We have everything we need here," says Judge, president of Judge Public Relations. "We have a bank, a post office, Starbucks and restaurants all right here in walking distance. Plus a permanent parking spot right at the airport."
He said it's a perk for his clients too, who can travel for just one day to Tampa for meetings.
"Overall, this enhances the passenger experience. Consumers have come to expect entertainment, restaurants and hotels when they fly into an airport. It's often an economic boost to the surrounding areas, too," said John Kasarda, an airport business consultant who literally wrote the book on airport cities. His book is called Aerotropolis.
"Good airport cities attract more passengers than those with less amenities," he said. "It's where businesses want to be now. It's not only good business rationale, but it contributes to the greater metro economy."
Contact Justine Griffin at firstname.lastname@example.org or (727) 893-8467. Follow @SunBizGriffin.


text:
Driver Partners drive our business and supporting them during the pandemic is mission critical for us. In view of the impact of COVID-19 on their livelihoods and in continuation of our efforts to support their wellbeing, we are partnering with Shell, one of India’s most diversified global energy companies. Through this partnership, we are facilitating the provision of benefits such as fuel, lubricants, coolants, car care products and beverages for them.
The Uber and Shell partnership extends support to all drivers in the States of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Those who enrol in the benefits scheme will get Shell’s new QR-code based virtual fuel card, allowing them to easily pay for fuel and access special rebates through a network of 180 Shell sites, spread across these four States.
Additionally, once activated, the first 10,000 driver partners in each of the four States can also avail a pre-loaded and one-time amount of INR 200, which can be used towards making purchases at any of the city based Shell stations.
These benefits are estimated to enable savings of upto INR 1,000 to 1,500 per month per driver partner, and will further help them to enhance their average monthly net savings by 10%-20%.
Speaking about the partnership, Deepti Behl, National Head, Shell Fleet Solutions for India said, “We are delighted to welcome driver partners registered on the Uber App as new customers of our Fleet Solutions programme in India. Ride-hailing is an important area of growth for India’s mobility market and COVID-19 has accelerated digitalisation and its value amongst our customers. Our partnership with Uber not only gives the drivers ease of fuel payment but access to a wide range of products and services at our retail stations like ready-to-eat meals and a safe place to refresh themselves during a day on the road. Shell’s new QR-code based virtual card, developed during the lockdown, caters to the changing customer needs to provide the added benefit of convenience and safety. This partnership will help driver partners realize further efficiencies in their operations.”
Over the past few years, we have undertaken multiple initiatives to support drivers, including a first-of-its-kind comprehensive platform, Uber Care, through which thousands of drivers got easy access to life insurance, free online medical consultations, micro-loans etc. Under Uber Care, micro-loans of INR 500 million have been facilitated till date to driver partners, and over 120,000 driver partners have signed up with our partner DocsApp for free medical consultations.
More recently, we have disbursed grants to approximately 100,000 driver partners under our Uber Care Driver Fund. We have also been providing financial assistance to those who’ve either been diagnosed with COVID-19 or have been placed in quarantine by health officials.
Driver Partners on our platform have always gone the extra mile for us and the Uber-Shell partnership acknowledges that they continue to remain at the heart of our business.


text:
If you own a business and a website you need to be aware of a substantial increase in claims by disabled plaintiffs and their attorneys regarding website accessibility. The plaintiffs argue that businesses which offer goods and services to the public through websites are public accommodations that must comply with the general accessibility mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”).
Unfortunately for businesses seeking guidance in what constitutes a legal technical standard for an “accessible” website, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) has announced that it will not issue any regulations for public accommodations of websites until fiscal year 2018. As a result, businesses will now struggle to walk through a difficult minefield of issues such as:
- What constitutes an “accessible” website?
- Is third party software and content on the site required to be accessible?
- What happens if an upgrade to a site causes an occasional or unintended barrier to accessibility?
These are just a few of the major questions businesses will face.
However, despite these lingering questions, plaintiff attorneys are now flooding business owners with demand letters and lawsuits alleging that their websites are not accessible to plaintiffs with disabilities. We’ve had clients receive these demand letters and I know several other business law firms have reported their clients received such claims too. My best guess is that plaintiff attorneys will look at businesses with sales in excess of $10-15 million first and then work their way down.
So, what do you do if you receive a demand letter or lawsuit claiming your website is not accessible to those with disabilities? First and foremost, do not delay in contacting your legal counsel. Make sure your lawyer is familiar with the claims and understands the issues. You then will need to decide whether to fight the claims or to settle. In a very complex (and uncertain) area of the law, many businesses appear to be considering settlement because it is less expensive and brings greater certainty to the situation. There is another cost to consider and that is the potential black eye your business could receive if it is identified as a business that does not support access to disabled persons. Businesses such as Target and others were hit by substantial lawsuits. Target set up a $6 million settlement fund after initially litigating the case. The case, filed by the National Federation of the Blind, was a public relations nightmare for the company. And I guarantee you plaintiff attorneys understand this. It will be very interesting to see how these cases shake out as it appears numerous cases are being filed each month.
But even if you are going to settle a case, there will be a price to pay to bring your website into compliance. You should work with website experts that understand website accessibility for disabled persons. In our experience, most website developers and designers do not understand these issues, or at the very least, pay very little attention to these issues. Consequently, this is not something you want to leave to your typical website developer.


text:
Since the last edition of PA's PR, the winners of the inaugural Parliamentary Book Awards have been revealed, the PA has launched the textbook challenge, calling for every child to have access to a textbook in the main subjects, and publishers have heard about opportunities for collaboration at the PA/BESA education conference. Meanwhile the Accessible Books Consortium is inviting nominations for an award for accessible publishing, publishers have travelled to the Moscow Book Fair and Academic Book Week is looking for the Academic Books That Made Great Britain.
INDUSTRY & PA NEWS
Parliamentary Book Award winners
Alan Johnson, Margaret Hodge, Melvyn Bragg and John Bew have been announced as the winners of the inaugural Parliamentary Book Awards, awarded by The Publishers Association and The Booksellers Association. Johnson won the award for best memoir for his autobiography The Long and Winding Road (Transworld), while Margaret Hodge won best work of non-fiction for her scrutiny of public spending in Called to Account (Little Brown). Lord Melvyn Bragg's historical novel Now is the Time (Sceptre), was named the best work of fiction and John Bew's Citizen Clem (Quercus), a biography of Clement Atlee, was named best political work by a non-parliamentarian. The awards were presented at a reception in the House of Commons.
Textbook Challenge campaign
The PA has launched the textbook challenge, a campaign calling for every child to have access to a textbook in the main subjects. The campaign follows independent survey results which showed that although over 90% of teachers thought textbooks improved pupil attainment and nearly 60% said it would help reduce the time they spend planning for lessons, 63% of teachers could be using textbooks more. Almost half of all teachers said funding strongly impacts their ability to use textbooks more. Read our blog to find out more about why we decided to launch the textbook challenge. Promote the campaign by using the #textbookchallenge hashtag.
Education publishers conference
Publishers should collaborate with multi-academy trusts to develop effective products, publishers heard at the PA/BESA Shifting Landscapes conference. Andrew Thraves, a trustee of Academies Enterprise Trust said MATs will be the new product innovators and warned that if publishers do not collaborate, they will bypass publishers and "do it themselves". Meanwhile Paul Fairbank, CEO of language support tool Languagenut, encouraged publishers to partner with tech companies, saying "you bring the credibility, and we bring the solution". He added that publishers are increasingly realising they are a distribution business as well as publishers.
Accessible Publishing Award
The Accessible Books Consortium is now inviting nominations for the 2017 Accessible Books Consortium International Excellence Award for Accessible Publishing. The deadline is 15 December 2016. This award recognises outstanding leadership and achievements in advancing the accessibility of commercial e-books or other digital publications for persons who are print disabled. The International Excellence awards also reward inclusive publishing companies and publishing innovation, among many others.
Moscow International Book Fair
The International Non/Fiction fair kicked off this week in Moscow with the UK as Guest of Honour. The British Council organised a cultural programme with 13 authors speaking both at the fair and in venues outside. The PA had a group of 11 publishers and agents looking to get their works translated into Russian. Following a briefing at the British Embassy about doing business in Russia, publishers were given an overview of the anti-piracy laws and legal measures open to publishers for site-blocking. The fair opened to grand aplomb with a welcome to the UK publishing and literature team.
Academic Books That Made Britain
Academic Book Week is calling for nominations to select the 20 Academic Books That Made Great Britain. The list of books will be published and promoted as part of Academic Book Week 2017, which is organised by the British Library, UCL, Research Libraries UK, the PA, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers and the Booksellers Association. During the first Academic Book Week, which was held in 2015, the list of 20 Academic Books That Changed the World was a major feature of the week and attracted worldwide media coverage. Nominations can be made here until Friday 9th December.
Guadalajara International Book Fair
Almost 50 publishers travelled to the Guadalajara International Book Fair last week, with publishers on the UK Collective Stand reporting a steady stream of appointments with both regular and new contacts. A number of companies on the stand and in the Rights Centre attended the fair for the first time. This year the fair celebrated its 30th anniversary and Latin America, a region rather than a single country, were the Countries of Honour. Books and items typical of each country were on sale as part of the pavilion's display, and a professional and cultural programme.
Wellcome sign-up deadline for publishers providing OA based on APCs
The deadline for signing up to requirements from Wellcome on what they expect of publishers providing OA journal articles from Wellcome grant holders is 16 December 2016. Publishers not actively signing up will not be eligible for funding from Wellcome to cover APCs for Wellcome-funded research submitted after 1 April 2017. The full list of requirements is on the Wellcome website, and to sign up publishers should mail email@example.com with publisher name, contact name, and an assertion that they can meet the requirements (publishers don’t, however, need to have fully implemented any necessary workflow changes by December 16).
Season’s Greetings: write to a writer at risk
Every year, English PEN encourages supporters to send seasonal greetings to writers at risk and their families. Past recipients have described how these cards can provide much-needed moral support, and a crucial reminder that they have not been forgotten; others have told of how they were afforded better treatment by prison guards as a result of cards flooding in from all over the world. Find out more here.
E-book accessibility audit goes live
An ebook plaform accessibility audit launched in August 2016 and completed in November has gone live. This joint project between several UK HEI disability and library services, Jisc and representatives from the book supply industry shows results in a dashboard format; it aims to provide an accessibility benchmark, and facilitate conversations between publishers, aggregators, librarians and disability officers. The audit itself was non-technical, involving testing by 33 universities and five suppliers; 44 platforms were tested, 65 publishers covered, and nearly 280 ebooks involved.
Market Research and Statistics
The November issue of Aid Projects Alert is now available. In this month’s issue there are four new projects, five approvals and three tenders.
Academic and Professional Statistics market snapshot is also available for PA members. Access using your company name and password.
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY
IBBY UK Honour List Books 2016, 8 December 2016, London
Developing Ethical Commercial Revenues in a Changing Publishing Landscape, 13 December 2016, Online
Introduction to Collective Licensing Sector Focus: STM & Academic Publishers, 15 December 2016, London
Effective management of Rights: Driving revenue and improving workflow, 23 January 2017, Online
Best practices in Editor-in-Chief Recruitment, 9 February 2017, online
Publishing Training Centre 2017 courses


text:
The start of the Black Friday shopping season was covered by our staff and we're continuing the trend of introducing low prices to the public who plan to utilize the discounts companies are offering this year.
Sacramento, California (PRWEB) December 02, 2013
Consumers who are seeking discount resources for shopping on the largest Internet shopping day of the year can now access a new deals list compiled by the Geekworthy company. This company has posted its best buy Cyber Monday deals ad online at http://geekworthy.com/holiday-deals.
A complete survey of Internet retailer companies online was used to compile the information that is now available to shoppers who plan to purchase exclusively online for the Christmas season. The Geekworthy company specializes in product reviews, locating price markdowns and supplying guides for end of the year pricing for the public.
"The start of the Black Friday shopping season was covered by our staff and we're continuing the trend of introducing low prices to the public who plan to utilize the discounts companies are offering this year," said a reviewer from the Geekworthy.com company.
The Geekworthy staff has helped to introduce new product releases throughout this year to bring a new source of information to the general public. While this company specializes in high tech gadget reviews, average consumer products purchased online are currently included in the advertisements compiled on the company website for consumers to view.
"As our company expands, the content that we're generating is being distributed to more sources online to enhance the readership by the public when researching for last-minute price markdowns," the reviewer included.
Aside from the technology products that are included at the Geekworthy company, an unbiased review of other popular products was made to help compile the sales information that is now listed online. Prices are known to change from retailer to retailer and the general products that are included by some companies online are also planned to be marked down for the December 2nd sales day online.
The Geekworthy.com company has created its review resource around the latest technology released in the United States by top retailers. The company staff of researchers and reviewers works daily to supply the American public with price information and the pros or cons of owning popular products. The Geekworthy.com company website is now syndicating all of its data using media partners to expand the consumer reach in the U.S. The solutions this company provides to the public are monitored by the company staff for success rates on a routine basis.


text:
Academics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich have found ingredients in chocolate could help protect us from diabetes.
A study of two thousand people discovered that eating high levels of flavonoids - which are found in chocolate, berries and tea - could offer protection from Type 2 diabetes.
Research found the food groups also appeared to lower the inflammation associated with obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
Click below to hear a clip from Amy Jennings from the UEA.
More top news
British Lion included in Cambridge University line-up for traditional warm-up
First group soon to go into service under joint initiative with Essex
Showers will fade away tonight, leading to clear skies and a bright start tomorrow


text:
Major League Baseball has reportedly reached an agreement with Under Armour for the apparel company to be the league's exclusive uniform provider beginning in 2020, according to Terry Lefton of SportsBusiness Daily. ESPN.com's Darren Rovell confirmed the report.
As part of the deal, Fanatics will be the official retailer of MLB jerseys. Fanatics will also provide on-field apparel for players.
This is the first time Under Armour has held exclusive uniform rights for a major American sports league. The company is the apparel provider for various colleges, including the Maryland Terrapins, Notre Dame Fighting Irish and Auburn Tigers. Rovell noted Under Armour produces workout apparel for the NFL Scouting Combine as well.
A number of top athletes have deals with Under Armour, including Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton, Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry, Washington Nationals right fielder Bryce Harper and Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Clayton Kershaw.
Under Armour's contract with MLB is a sign of its growth and desire to continue building its profile in the United States. The company made a push last summer to be the NBA's uniform provider starting in 2017-18 but lost out to Nike.
With Under Armour taking over for Majestic Athletic, which has produced MLB uniforms since 2005, many will wonder if players' duds will get a new look.
When Nike replaced Reebok as the NFL's apparel provider in 2012, it declined to make significant alterations to most uniforms, with the exception of the Seattle Seahawks'.
Over the years, though, Under Armour has gained attention for its unique designs and could opt for a similar strategy with MLB.


text:
COVID-19 pandemic brings out entrepreneurial spirit in Puerto Ricans
People around the world have lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and while the government has helped in some ways, it is not enough for some families. Even young college students need money to finance their studies, but finding a job is not that easy to achieve anymore.
And so, while stuck at home, four individuals sought to empower themselves through self-employment and entrepreneurship to sustain themselves and their loved ones.
Pegatina PR, owned by Juan Camacho-Maldonado and Chessica Maldonado-Agosto, was created in Summer 2020 as a business experiment. This mother-son duo specializes in custom-made decals in vinyl material, or “stickers,” for cups, computers, etc., as well as custom shirts, face masks, cake toppers, and others.
While they manage online sales through social media, they handle two different publics. Juan Camacho runs an Instagram page, mostly selling stickers for cups or phones. His mom manages the Facebook page, where they first saw a “boom” for a specific item — computer covers.
“I published a picture of one of the covers on Facebook and it got shared in a teacher’s page. Just like that, every teacher and friend of a teacher started asking for one, as if were the most popular item around them,” said Maldonado-Agosto, co-owner of Pegatina PR.
Since Maldonado works as a full-time teacher, she promoted the computer covers as an option for her colleagues, which had a domino-effect on sales. So now, Juan Camacho will start pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business administration to “perfect” Pegatina PR and create a business of his own of accessories and clothing, he said.
When asked about changing his bachelor’s degree to Business Administration, Camacho-Maldonado, said, “I hope to find all the business techniques I need in my studies to finally perfect Pegatina PR and eventually start a business of my own.”
This duo will continue working as best as they can while managing their normal jobs and studies, hoping for a better 2021, they said.
Another college student affected by the pandemic and looking for a way to help pay for her studies, is Wilmary Santana-Rodriguez. As a student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in microbiology at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus, she had to find a way to pay for rent.
Sunny Creations is the name of her own business project and hobby, in which she creates accessories and earrings based on the crochet technique. Santana was put in a tight spot at the beginning of the academic semester, and while needing to release stress, this art form, helped her out.
“I might be having a bad day in school but coming back and seeing how satisfied my customers are with my products keeps me going. It also motivates me to keep creating and inventing for them. I decided to name it Sunny Creations to leave the doors open for any products I can create,” said Santana-Rodriguez.
She plans on getting her artisan license when turning 18 to open a kiosk in a farmer’s market on weekends.
The last entrepreneurial story — which is a bit different from the others — comes from Nicole Combas-Martinez, a mother of three who created D’Perfect Smells to sustain her family. This self-owned small business sells soaps, creams, scrubs, candles, sanitizers, etc., with the distinction of being scented.
“I’ve always liked arts and crafts and a friend told me to try making a candle. I made an ice cream candle, and it wasn’t until my second candle that I thought I could make this into something more. Now this helps keep my family stable, and I enjoy every second of it,” said Combas-Martinez, owner of D’Perfect Smells.
When COVID-19 provoked the lockdown, her children needed someone to take care of them from home while they studied, and so in the process, she quit her job of cleaning houses to open this small business.
Combas plans on getting an artisan license to open a kiosk on weekends and hopes to leave her business to her children, when they are old enough.
Out of the three entrepreneurial concepts, Combas-Martinez’s is the only one who does it on a full-time basis and ships her merchandise to the US mainland. Although the other businesses do not close the door to any clients from other countries either.
As for sales, they all say to be in a “good place” with weekly sales, and report no loses. Their initial investments ranged from $50 to $500 with equipment, but all was gained back within two months, the interviewees confirmed.
Leave a Comment


text:
Customer satisfaction with the total shopping experience at Target has declined for a fourth consecutive period, according to a new survey of 2,500 people done by investment bank Cowen. Declines in customer satisfaction were seen across the board, led by drops in customer service, merchandise selection and product quality. Overall, Cowen says customer satisfaction at Target plunged 383 basis points to 66.7%.
It appears unhappy Target shoppers could be taking their business elsewhere.
On Wednesday, the discount retailer reported first quarter same-store sales fell 1.3%. While that was better than analyst estimates for a 3.6% drop, it marked the fourth straight quarterly decline in the key retail measure. Walmart's U.S. business, on the other hand, saw same-store sales gain 1.4% in the first quarter on the back of efforts to slash food prices and bolster customer service.
Wall Street shrugged off Target's sales choppiness, for now.
Target shares rose 0.9% to $55.04 in Wednesday trading as earnings beat forecasts, due mostly to expense timing and other cost savings. Shares gained as much as 2% on Thursday. First quarter adjusted earnings came in at $1.21 a share, hammering projections for 89 cents a share. Total sales clocked in at $16.02 billion, surpassing forecasts for $15.64 billion.
The company left its full year profit outlook of $3.80 to $4.20 a share unchanged, but acknowledged the better than expected start to the year may lead it to finish above the range's midpoint.
Target CEO Brian Cornell conceded on a conference call that the company has a ways to go before it's back to full health. "We aren't doing any high fives in the room," said Cornell.
"Target management understands our fears: physical store comps being down 2.2% driven by declining traffic gives the need to intensify changing customer perception that you can "pay less" at Target as the retailer is likely losing share on everyday essentials, as customers turn to Amazon (AMZN) - Get Amazon.com, Inc. Report , Walmart and other places," says Cowen analyst Oliver Chen.
"Our view is that the company may need to focus on optimizing customer satisfaction."
Click here for the latest business headlines.
Editor's Pick: Originally published May 18.


text:
Tupperware Brands Corp. shares jumped 6 percent after the maker of plastic containers said sales were improving in overseas markets.
Sales are tracking near the high end of its forecast for the third quarter, based on local currencies, the Orlando, Florida-based company said in a statement Wednesday. Its performance is rebounding in Indonesia, France and Italy, and growth in Argentina, Brazil, China, Mexico and South Africa remains strong despite economic challenges, Tupperware said.
“While we, like many other global consumer products companies are navigating through a volatile external environment, particularly in the emerging markets, we are pleased that two months into the quarter we are tracking toward the high end of our local currency sales outlook range,” Chief Executive Officer Rick Goings said in the statement.
The stock climbed to $52 in New York, the biggest one-day gain since Jan. 28. Tupperware shares had been down 22 percent this year before the rally.


text:
Rapidly-growing motorhome brokerage ‘graduates’ from Mansfield Innovation Centre to new HQ
A fast-growing motorhome firm says its move from the Mansfield Innovation Centre to new head office premises will underpin its exciting plans for future growth.
Motorhome Depot is Europe’s largest motorhome marketplace, which offers a secure and stress-free alternative way of buying and selling a motorhome or caravan. Acting as an ‘estate agent for motorhomes’, the firm’s independent brokers look after every aspect of the process, from initial inspection and valuation right through to negotiating a sale price, closing the deal and securely managing the financial transaction.
The multi award-winning firm started life in the Mansfield Innovation Centre, in 2012, with four employees. It has grown into a business which employs 35 members of staff and has a network of more than 60 franchisees across the UK and Europe.
Its move to bigger premises, on the town’s Oakham Business Park, will support its plans for future growth. These include the opening of a dedicated training centre for its HabCheck brand, which provides a mobile independent and impartial pre-purchase inspection and habitation check service for motorhomes and caravans.
The additional space will help the firm to expand HabCheck and its number of franchisees across the UK, and grow its network of independent motorhome brokers.
Motorhome Depot’s Finance Director Adam Reek said: “We have ambitious plans for growth, with a strategy that includes expanding our presence in the UK to maximise our market share and developing throughout mainland Europe.
“The support we have received from the team at the Mansfield Innovation Centre has been invaluable over the years. It has enabled us to grow the business to where we are today and has given us a solid platform for future growth.”
Mansfield Innovation Centre Manager Hannah Hickman added: “Motorhome Depot is one of our big success stories and it has been fantastic to play a part in their growth and watch them go from strength to strength.
“Over the past eight years, we have provided funding, training and mentoring to help them achieve their success.
“Their move to new premises marks the end of an era. Although their team leaves the Mansfield Innovation Centre with our best wishes, we look forward to continuing to work closely with them to support their growth plans as they embark on this exciting new chapter.”


text:
Growing demand for containers and data lakes are among the major trends being seen by Amazon Web Services, according to its CEO, Andy Jassy.
“Everybody wants a data lake,” he said Nov. 27 during a keynote at the company’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. “In some ways, it’s this year’s version of machine learning and big data and the cloud,” he said, adding: “We have over 10,000 data lakes…. We have a lot of experience with it. But it’s hard work to set up a data lake right.”
Meanwhile, “more and more companies are looking to use containers,” he said, noting AWS has “an incredible number of customers now using containers on top of AWS and we have a lot more offerings there than you will find anywhere else.”
Jassy and Terry Wise, VP of AWS Global Alliances and Channels, also cited strong demand for Amazon SageMaker. “Thousands and thousands of customers are already using SageMaker” since it was launched at re:Invent last year, Jassy said. In introducing the service last year, he called it “an easy way to build, train and deploy machine learning models for everyday developers.”
Among other trends, Jassy this time said: “The days of using relational databases for all your workloads has come and gone. That ship has sailed. People are using purpose-built databases for … particular use cases and workloads.”
He also told attendees: “I think we’re just at the early stages of the meat of enterprise and public sector adoption in the U.S. Outside the U.S., I’d say we’re 12 to 36 months behind, depending on the country and the industry. So, there are a lot of mainstream enterprises that are just now starting to plan their approach to the cloud in any kind of meaningful way.”
AWS also announced several new services and features at re:Invent once again. For example, it said AWS Ground Station is a new service that “makes it easy and cost-effective for customers to download data from satellites into AWS Global Infrastructure Regions using a fully managed network of 12 ground station antennas located around the world.”
After customers receive satellite data at a ground station, they can “immediately process it in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, store it in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), apply AWS analytics and machine learning services to gain insights, and use Amazon’s network to move the data to other regions and processing facilities,” it said in a news release.
AWS also announced four significant services and capabilities that it said “make it easier to ingest data from edge devices and build rich” Internet of Things (IoT) applications.”
AWS IoT SiteWise is a new managed service that collects, structures, and searches IoT data from industrial facility devices and uses it to analyze equipment and process performance data, the company said.
AWS IoT Events, meanwhile, is a managed IoT service that it said “makes it easy to detect and respond to changes indicated by IoT sensors and applications, such as malfunctioning equipment or a stuck conveyor belt, and automatically trigger actions or alerts.”
AWS IoT Things Graph is a new service that it said “makes it easy to build IoT applications with little or no code by connecting different devices and cloud services, such as linking humidity sensors to sprinklers to weather data services to create an agricultural application, through a visual drag-and-drop interface.”
And AWS IoT Greengrass Connectors provides developers with the ability to connect third-party applications including ServiceNow for service management, on-premises software like Splunk for log analytics, and AWS services including Amazon Kinesis for data ingest via common cloud Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). “With this ability, developers can easily add more features like location-based services, replenishment, industrial data processing, alarm and messaging, repair and maintenance, logistics, and more, without writing code,” AWS said.
For more information about Ground Station, click here.


text:
The cocoa ingredients supplier is trialing its ‘Chocolate Bonus’ system in Vietnam in collaboration with select Japanese customers. Under the arrangement, participating farmers are paid $170 per metric ton on top of the London market price and a certification premium.
“It’s like the VAT system,” Gricha Safarian, managing director of Puratos Grand-Place told ConfectioneryNews at the recent Asia Choco Cocoa Congress in Singapore. “We take some money at the consumer level and it goes up….and rather than reaching the state it reaches the farmer – so the farmer is really the ultimate beneficiary.”
How does it work?
Puratos Grand-Place pays the London market price – currently £1,972 per MT and a certification premium on top of that from its own Cacao-Trace program, which ranges from $50-150, depending on the quality of the cocoa. A Chocolate Bonus of $170 per MT is then passed on from the company directly to farmers twice a year. The bonus is financed by retailers upping the price of finished products in store by a few cents.
Puratos Grand-Place is currently experimenting with a few Japanese customers that are using the Chocolate Bonus as a marketing tool.
“It’s like we’re doing two invoices. One invoice that we sell to the industry and then there’s another invoice which is this chocolate bonus. We collect it, we don’t touch it and we distribute it twice a year to the farmers who have signed the agreement with us,” said Safarian.
Consumers pay more
For 100 g of chocolate, this will mean consumers pay an extra $0.12 cents. “The idea is to ask the end consumer to pay,” said the Puratos Grand-Place chief
“The consumer wants everything to be perfect, sustainable and green, but they don’t want to pay an extra penny.”
“Social media is making everything transparent, so the people in the street don’t want to see that chocolate is linked to extreme poverty, so why don’t they pay and extra cent when they know it will go up to the farmer and will reduce the poverty level. It’s an anti-extreme poverty tax.”
Puratos-Grand Place also provides training and communication to the farmers and the Chocolate Bonus can also be paid in fertilizer.
Raising income via pricing is key
“The biggest problem of the industry is farmers’ income….the industry can dance around and build hospitals and schools, but at the end of the day we need to increase the farmer’s income by a combination of price and yields,” said Safarian.
“So far we have limited this experimentation with Japanese customers and they are extremely enthusiastic….My dream would be that all our competitors imitate this and it becomes a system that is beneficial for the industry.”
Battling competing crops
But Vietnam is very different to West Africa. Safarian said: “Farmers are not poor. The issue is not fighting extreme poverty, child labor, slavery or deforestation – these things are not happening in Vietnam. But what we are fighting is competing crops like palm oil, rubber and cashew nuts.”
He said the premium could be higher in other origins such as Côte D’Ivoire, where farmers only receive around 60% of the market price due to taxation.
“So far it’s working. Is it expandable? The future will tell,” he said.


text:
EMI Group chairman Guy Hands has made a bid for U.K. independent music group Chrysalis, Billboard understands.
The London Times and Reuters today report that there have also been rival indicative bids from Warner Chappell and Sony/ATV, as well as interest from several private equity funds and music publishers.
Chrysalis founder and chairman Chris Wright announced a review of the business last year, which could result in the sale of the company.
Chrysalis’ music publishing arm has the rights to artists including David Bowie, Gnarls Barkley and Athlete, and it recently signed a worldwide deal with former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. Chrysalis also owns the Echo label and the international wholesale distribution business Lasgo Chrysalis.
The company sold its radio business last July for £170 million ($340) in order to focus on its music companies. Last month Chrysalis said it was in preliminary discussions with “select parties” which could lead to an offer. Shares in Chrysalis today increased by almost 11%.
EMI declined to comment. A spokesman for Chrysalis has yet to return calls.


text:
Analysts attribute the company's poor performance during the quarter to slowdown in the economy and low footfalls in EBO’s (exclusive brand outlet). Jockey’s volume decline was across the categories. The volume pressure was mainly due to less number of footfalls across channels.
“Going ahead, analysts at Dolat Capital believe that slowdown in the economy would restrict the company’s performance in the near term. Nevertheless, new product launches in men, women and kid’s category and impetus to increase penetration especially in kid’s category would help the company to register double digit growth in H2FY20E”, the brokerage firm said in result update.
“Page has reported 2.4 per cent volume de-growth during the quarter. The volume slowdown in the innerwear industry is during July 2019 as well. Nevertheless, we believe that with aggressive expansion plans (to double the store count over next few years), increase in distribution reach and capacity additions would help enhance volume growth for Page. Further, ongoing efforts to launch new products in kid’s category would help accelerate overall volume performance,” it said.
“However, with return ratios and free cash flow (FCF) generation holding-up well, we expect the stock to recover to its long-term average earnings multiple of 50x eventually, though after some more correction from current levels. The stock should find takers at lower levels given the strong return ratios led by increased outsourcing, Page Industries’ dominant position and retail reach and the massive growth opportunity in its target market,” analysts at Systematix Shares and Stocks (India) said in result update.
Thus far in the calendar year 2019, Page Industries
has underperformed the market by falling 31 per cent, as compared to 4 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex.


text:
At least 37 people have been killed with dozens more missing after a fire began in an indoor trampoline park inside a Siberian shopping mall early on Monday (local time).
Russian television showed images of thick black smoke pouring out of the Winter Cherry shopping center in the city of Kemerovo, which also houses a sauna, a bowling alley and a multiplex cinema and was packed with people on Sunday afternoon.
The fire department says the blaze started on the 4th floor, which houses movie theaters and a children's play area.
Kemerovo is about 800 kilometers (approximately 500 miles) northeast of the Kazakhstan border, around 3,600 kilometers (1,800 miles) east of the Russian capital Moscow.
The blaze started on an upper floor of the Winter Cherry complex while numerous victims were at the cinema.
Reports from witnesses have described panic as people realised there was a fire spreading, with many saying on social media that there were no fire alarms or loudspeaker warnings, and that people had to find their own way through the top floor of the mall, which was already filled with smoke.
It has a auto park for 250 cars, shops, a bowling alley, a children's centre, a cinema, food courts and a petting zoo, the agency said.
Thirteen people remained in hospital on Monday night, including an 11-year-old boy who was seriously injured when he jumped out of a window.
Fortnite and PUBG on Mobile Is Apparently Causing Havoc In Schools
For a while it seemed that Bluehole's PUBG would simply steamroll anything put in its way thanks to its enormous initial success. Epic has shown off what could very well be the next step in games technology - and it looks stunning.
In December 2001, a very big fire started unintentionally by a fireworks vendor engulfed the historic downtown Mesa Redonda shopping area in Lima, leaving 447 people dead.
The fire - among the deadliest in years in Russian Federation - has been extinguished, emergency officials said, but rescuers were having difficulty in reaching the upper floors of the building due to a roof collapse.
Around 120 people had been evacuated from the burning centre, rescuers said on Sunday.
He said "64 is the final figure", and included six people still buried under the rubble.
Opened in 2013, the Winter Cherry shopping mall covers an area 23,000 square meters, and includes parking space for 250 cars.
"They took three minutes - three (expletive) minutes! - to put on their masks", Lillevyali said, also with tears in his eyes. It's not known how many children have now been found, or are among the dead and injured.
Within hours of opening an investigation into the cause of the fire, the Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said authorities were looking into several "serious violations" of fire safety codes.
Russian state investigators said four people had been detained over the fire, including the owners and leasers of outlets inside the shopping mall.


text:
HBO Max is WarnerMedia’s subscription video-on-demand service. Available since May 2020 in the United States, it is not available everywhere….
Torrent Download: What were the most pirated TV shows in 2019?Publié le
Despite the advent of platforms such as Netflix and all the efforts made by rights holders and authorities in several countries to curb the illegal streaming and downloading of audiovisual works, piracy continues to attract hundreds of millions of users worldwide. This year, the arrival of new SVOD platforms such as Apple TV+ and Disney+ with their respective exclusives has indirectly stimulated the torrenting that continues to exist in the piracy landscape, even though users prefer to stream.
In fact, some of these exclusives are among the most downloaded series of 2019, while the two new SVOD services were launched in the last quarter. Here is the list of the most downloaded series in Torrent this year.
Most downloaded/streamed series in Torrent in 2019
This list is issued by the Torrent Freak website specialized in p2p hacking news. The ranking is partly based on the aggregation of data provided by Torrent download platform trackers.
- Game Of Thrones
- The Mandalorian
- The Big Bang Theory
- The Walking Dead
- The Flash
- Rick and Morty
Unsurprisingly, it’s Game Of Thrones that finds itself at the top of the rankings with its latest season followed by hundreds of millions of fans around the world. As a reminder, the HBO series was for many years the most pirated television production.
Daenerys, Game of Thrones, S08e02 – HBO
It is closely followed by another HBO production, Chernobyl, which traces the drama of the events leading up to the disaster of 26 April 1986.
Disney+’s The Mandalorian makes a stunning entry into third place in the rankings in less than two months. All indications are that Disney’s production will soon occupy first place in this ranking.
Indeed, Baby Yoda’s adventures are not yet officially available worldwide and this undoubtedly encourages piracy of the work. The next phase of Disney+’s global launch will begin in the spring of 2020 and Season 2 of The Mandalorian is already scheduled for release in the fall of that year.
Source: Torrent Freak
Autres articles sur le même sujet
The new version of FIFA is coming on October 6th. Usually, EA Sports gives players a preview of the game…


text:
- 4 min read
Pharma's future bright but challenges persist in Gujarat
The Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) Gujarat issued at least 1,640 fresh licences to allopathic drug makers in the past three years i.e. 490 in 2020, 559 in 2021, and 551 in 2022. Estimates by industry players indicate this has drawn investments worth at least Rs 10,000 crore into the pharma sector of Gujarat.
The Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) Gujarat issued at least 1,640 fresh licences to allopathic drug makers in the past three years i.e. 490 in 2020, 559 in 2021 and 551 in 2022. Estimates by industry players indicate this has drawn investments worth at least Rs 10,000 crore into the pharma sector of Gujarat.
Gujarat is now home to at least 4,047 allopathic drug manufacturers. Explaining the trend, HG Koshia, commissioner, FDCA Gujarat, said, “Since the GST rollout, the state has seen a lot of enthusiasm from pharma players who shifted base here from northern and northeastern states as the taxation was uniform . However, the same has increased multifold since COVID, given the resilience shown by the pharma manufacturers here. Several players applied for new product licences for COVID-associated drugs such as favipiravir and remdesivir.”
Industry sources also revealed that many non-pharma players like HOF Furniture and Pashupati Textiles and Sankalp Group have also started formulations manufacturing plants in the last two years. Besides, several existing companies also forayed into API manufacturing to reduce import dependence on China.
With the entry of more players, the competition has gone up and therefore, new entities often find it challenging to penetrate the market, leaving units with underutilized manufacturing capacity.
Established players bid for API manufacturing since COVID-19, with at least 115 new plants getting licences to make manufacture drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the state is buoyed to witness an investment of Rs 2,000 crore.
The operational companies in the state have a strong base in pharmaceutical formulations and now, APIs are going to be their next big leap. “The pharma industry is highly dependent on China to procure bulk drugs for vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids. The arrival of new API units will reduce imports significantly. Once the API park comes up, bigger companies will invest here,” said Atul Shah, treasurer of IDMAGujarat.
A slew of pharma players is awaiting necessary clearances to start manufacturing units for APIs in Surat, Vadodara, and Ahmedabad, among other locations. On average, about 30 new API manufacturers have obtained licences every year till 2019-20.
This has doubled to 60 per year since COVID, indicates FDCA’s, Gujarat data. Amid disruptions in Chinese supply chains, fluctuations in the domestic industry have affected the pharma companies. If indigenous API production increases in Gujarat, the prices of medicines will come down too, according to stakeholders.
Pharma makers in state make APIs such as cephalosporins, steroids, inorganic salts, proton pump inhibitors, analgesics, antipyretics and anti-inflammatory drugs like paracetamol, Diclofenac sodium, aceclofenac, ibuprofen, anti-hypertensives, anti-diabetics and anti-virals but the key starting materials for most of these are imported.
With new units coming up, the APIs for oncology, hormones, vitamins, steroids and antibiotics, which were earlier imported mainly from China, will be locally manufactured in Gujarat.
“Several pharma sector players are keen on their foray into API manufacturing. Some 1,500 units are currently into producing APIs. However, most are small and medium scale units. The upcoming units will not just augment capacities but also offer APIs for oncology and hormone medicines. This will help reduce India’s imports from China for API manufacturing,” said Shrenik Shah, chairman, Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association (IDMA), Gujarat chapter.
Non-pharma players turn to pharma since COVID-19, several industrialists from the textiles, chemicals and furniture sectors have forayed into the pharma sector, eyeing better growth prospects.
A financial instruments manufacturer entered the sector recently. “We decided to enter the pharma sector before COVID and started manufacturing during the COVID period. We did so because pharma is a regulated industry. We manufacture tablets and capsules for general medicines. We invested Rs 30 crore in the plant which is suitable for the European marketand hope to start supply in a year,” said Kamal Shah, MD of a pharma firm.
“Several new entrants were keen on exporting to foreign markets. However, due to COVID-19, many plants are still awaiting regulatory approvals. Some of them are therefore turning to contract manufacturing,” said Viranchi Shah, national president, IDMA.


text:
THE firm behind single malt whisky Scapa has opened a visitor centre at the Orkney distillery.
It is said to be the first time the Chivas Brothers-owned distillery has been accessible to the public in its 130-year history. The centre offers visitors a tour of the facility’s traditional production methods, including its Lomond still, and natural harbour Scapa Flow in front of the distillery.
Brian MacAulay, distilling manager at Scapa, said: “I have personally taken the pleasure in removing our ‘no visitors’ sign and I know I speak on behalf of the team here in saying that we can’t wait to see the Scapa Distillery form an interesting, educative and welcoming part of the Orkney community.”
The centre employs two permanent and two seasonal staff; it will be open seven days a week until September 28 and five days a week until November 13.
Caroline Mitchell, visitor centres manager at Chivas Brothers, said it will offer Scotch aficionados, locals and tourists “the chance to immerse themselves in the Scapa experience for the first time”.


text:
Callebaut’s 811 dark Belgium chocolate has been chosen to round off the dinner at Food Ink’s international tour.
Food Ink – which claims to be the world’s first 3D printing restaurant – kicked off its world tour this week at The Old Truman Brewery in London.
The restaurant partnered with Callebaut in search for high quality ingredients and offered the chocolate as part of the desert following a nine-course dinner.
Food Ink head chef, Joel Castanye, who prepared the evening meals said: “It is great to work with top ingredients from all over the world and for the chocolate we naturally looked to Belgium. Using Callebaut’s Finest Belgian Chocolate for our desserts was crucial to us and is an absolute dream to work with.”
Pascale Meulemeester, vice president of Global Gourmet at Callebaut, said: “It’s a great honour for us to be part of this event and participate in such a highly innovative project. This proves once again that Callebaut’s Finest Belgian Chocolate is the chocolate preferred by chefs worldwide.”
Everything in the restaurant is 3D printed, including the furniture and cutlery. The Food Ink tour will stop next at Berlin, and continue to Dubai, Seoul, Rome, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, NYC, Taipei, Las Vegas, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, Austin, Singapore, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Sydney, Reykjavik.


text:
Doing good and being successful aren’t mutually exclusive. For many companies, putting people and planet before profit (or at least alongside it) is the key to their success.
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard recently made headlines when he announced that he had placed ownership of his nearly 50-year-old company in a trust and would spend all future profits on environmental causes.
Since its inception, Patagonia has valued protecting our planet. Its new ownership structure allows the company to further its impact in this effort. In September, the Chouinard family transferred all ownership of Patagonia to two new entities: Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective.
The Patagonia Purpose Trust will help facilitate Patagonia’s demonstration that a for-profit business can work for the planet and ensure that Patagonia stays committed to running a socially responsible business and giving away its profits.
The Holdfast Collective will use Patagonia’s profits that are not reinvested back into the business to protect nature and biodiversity, help communities thrive and fight the environmental crisis. Patagonia has donated $50 million already to its Holdfast Collective and expects to contribute another $100 million in 2022.
“Instead of ‘going public,’ you could say we’re ‘going purpose,’” Chouinard said in a letter to the public on Patagonia’s website.
Entrepreneurs can learn a lot from this brand and its leader as they strive to build a brand that doesn’t just do well but also does good. Here are four cues to take from Patagonia.
1. Identify your passion/problem
Patagonia has a crystal-clear purpose: help outfit people for the outdoors, then use the profits from those sales to protect the outdoors. The company never strays from its commitment to doing good because it’s baked into the brand.
If you’re still in the ideating phase of entrepreneurship, build your brand around whatever issue you are particularly passionate about. What inspired you to start this company? Chances are there will be an intuitive connection between the products or services you provide and the problems you want to solve. For instance, your financial services company might help support aging with dignity.
Whatever it is, it’s essential that you bake it into your business model instead of trying to shoehorn something in. Customers can always sniff out virtue signaling, and investors and shareholders might also become frustrated if their return on investment looks different than you originally promised. So when you’re raising capital or awareness for your business, communicate your purpose from the outset. That way you can bring along people who believe in the power of your vision and are willing to financially support it.
2. Outline your ideal ownership structure
Patagonia had the highest-profile ownership change in recent memory—but the brand isn’t unique in this approach.
S. Dale High and his family transferred their shares of High Industries, a group of affiliated companies that serve the construction and manufacturing markets, to the High Foundation in March 2022. The foundation will now receive more than $5 million annually for programs that address poverty and build up communities.
“This allows our coworkers the satisfaction of knowing that the profits they help generate will go back into the community,” High said in a video that played at a news conference to announce the new ownership structure. “So, every day when they are building value, they are building it for the community.”
According to a Harvard Business Review article, “a quarter of the largest 100 firms [in Denmark] are foundation-owned, including the three largest firms in the country: Carlsberg, Maersk and Novo Nordisk.” These initiatives often came from entrepreneurs, the article explains, who gave ownership to these newly created foundations instead of selling their companies or passing them down to heirs in order to help “ensure the long-term stability of both business and philanthropic activities.”
What does your ideal ownership structure look like that helps you further live out the values at the heart of the company?
3. Make it count
In a 2019 Global Human Capital Trends survey, Deloitte found that 34% of CEOs had begun to focus on social impact as their top measure of success. According to Deloitte, the value these companies have derived from focusing on social impact has related to areas including:
- Products and services: “53% of CXOs said they had successfully generated new revenue streams from new socially conscious offerings.”
- Brand: “66% of global consumers and 73% of millennials are willing to pay a price premium for sustainable goods.”
- Talent: “A 2019 survey of 1,000 employees at large US companies found that nearly half of all respondents and three-quarters of millennial workers would take a pay cut to work at an environmentally responsible company. More than 10% of respondents said they would be willing to take as much as a $5,000–10,000 pay cut.” Employees are drawn to working for companies who take corporate social responsibility (CSR) seriously.
In addition to these findings, the 2016 Cone Communications Millennial Employee Engagement Study found that “83% [of millennials] would be more loyal to a company that helps them contribute to social and environmental issues,” and “64% [of millennials] won’t take a job if [the] company doesn’t have strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) values.”
These statistics demonstrate that profit and ethics don’t have to be mutually exclusive and that values-based companies are attractive to investors and employees.
4. Remember consistency is key
Jim Collins, author of From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, told Fast Company that the story of Patagonia is a five-decade one. “Compounding consistently over time, while retaining control, gives you the freedom to make decisions that align with what your company’s about,” he said.
According to a 2018 Fast Company article, Patagonia believes that “the more it invests in its beliefs and its products, the better Patagonia performs, develops creative solutions and maps out a blueprint for other businesses, big and small, to follow.”
“Doing good work for the planet,” then-CEO Rose Marcario told Fast Company, “creates new markets and makes [us] more money.”
So its recent structural change was in line with everything consumers know about Patagonia. But the reverse is also true: Purpose or values that are seen as merely performative can turn people off and away.
That’s why it’s critical to regularly review and share your purpose and values among key stakeholders and be accountable to how you’re tracking against them.
Photo by Sander van der Werf/Shutterstock
Jill McDonnell is a Chicago-based content writer and communications professional. She has a bachelor's degree in magazine journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a master's degree in public relations and advertising from DePaul University. She is currently at work on a psychological thriller novel.


text:
Amazon’s first-ever Big Spring Sale is kicking off March 20, giving customers to shop deals on seasonally relevant items.
According to the retail giant, discounts will include spring fashion, outdoor furniture, lawn and garden essentials, and cleaning and organizing products.
All customers can shop the sale, which includes deals on Amazon devices like Echo and Kindle devices. Prime members will also receive access to exclusive discounts.
The company said it will release new deals each day of the six-day event.
Amazon's website. (Credit: DENIS CHARLET/AFP via Getty Images)
The sale runs through March 25.
In December, Amazon said it was piloting a grocery delivery subscription service that would give Prime members in select cities unlimited grocery deliveries for $9.99 a month.
Amazon said in an email that all Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market deliveries over $35 would be included in the subscription. Prime members pay $139 a year for faster shipping, free delivery on non-grocery items and other perks.
The retail giant is testing the subscription service in three cities: Denver, Colorado; Sacramento, California; and Columbus, Ohio.


text:
Jan 18, 2021 (Baystreet.ca via COMTEX) -- There’s no denying 2020 was a big year for video game growth.
In fact, with the pandemic keeping millions of people at home, video game spending in the U.S. totaled $56.9 billion for 2020. That was 27% higher year over year, according to NPD. In December 2020 alone, sales were up to an impressive $7.7 billion.
For 2021, the video game industry could see global revenue of $189.3 billion, says Newzoo, adding there could be 2.8 billion gamers worldwide in 2021. Part of that tremendous growth has been driven by the eSports market.
In fact, “Global eSports revenue was projected to reach $1.1 billion in 2020, with a majority of that earned through media rights and sponsorships, according to esports research platform Newzoo,” as noted by the South Florida Business Journal.
However, that may only be the start. At the moment, nearly 70% of China’s 720 million gamers are actively playing eSports games, as noted by CNBC. In addition, U.S. News & World Report has said, “The global eSports audience is expected to double from 335 million in 2017 to 646 million by 2023, according to Business Insider.
In short, the industry still has plenty of upside momentum.
One of the companies benefiting from the growth is Enthusiast Gaming Holdings Inc. /zigman2/quotes/216212788/delayed CA:EGLX -0.70% (otcqb:ENGMF), which reaches over 300 million monthly video game and eSports fans worldwide. Helping, the company recently announced it signed Samsung to an integrated sponsorship deal, leveraging its media, content, esports and entertainment platforms.
The multi-platform sponsorship will utilize the breadth of Enthusiast Gaming’s reach in the coveted Gen Z and Millennial demographics, to help drive awareness and market share for Samsung’s gaming focused computing components and accessories.
Enthusiast Gaming isn’t the only player in town


text:
Major energy suppliers may be stripped of the right to challenge an unfair energy price cap after a group of MPs suggested an appeal process could be used as a delaying tactic.
The parliamentary committee for business defied regulatory convention by saying energy companies should not be allowed to appeal the regulator’s set price for standard energy tariffs with the Competition and Market Authority.
Ahead of the Government’s first major intervention in the household energy market the MPs said suppliers may use a CMA appeal to “unnecessarily delay” the implementation of the price cap by this winter.
The latest political blow leaves energy companies at the mercy of Ofgem’s cost calculations with little recourse if it sets the price cap too low to allow suppliers to cover their costs.
The industry trade group told the committee that Ofgem’s price controls for regulated energy companies are always subject to both a judicial review and a CMA appeal.
But the committee has concluded that energy suppliers will only be able to challenge the looming cap on over 11 million household energy bills via the judicial route, which judges the legality of regulation rather than its substantive fairness.
The cross-party group has strongly backed the decision of ministers to legislate an absolute cap on standard energy deals to protect customers who don’t shop around for better deals from paying over the odds for their gas and power.
In a pre-legislative report the MPs said energy companies “have brought the introduction of a price cap upon themselves” by their raising energy prices last year and failing to move customers from standard tariffs onto better energy deals.
Rachel Reeves, the committee chairman and a Labour MP, said: “The Big Six energy companies might whine and wail about the introduction of a price cap but they’ve been overcharging their customers on default and standard variable tariffs for years.”
“Their recent feeble efforts to move consumers off these tariffs has only served to highlight the need for this intervention,” she added.
The energy price cap legislation tasks Ofgem with setting a fair price for households using standard energy tariffs, based on profit margins of just 1.25pc.
The committee itself criticised the regulator for allowing the market to become “dysfunctional” in recent years but could effectively remove any substantive appeal against its twice-yearly price caps.
Ofgem admitted last week that its price cap for vulnerable customers would cut the savings it promised millions of households just four months ago by half, because the costs underpinning energy supply have climbed.
Ms Reeves said Ofgem has been too slow and reluctant to step in and protect the interests of customers in the past. The committee urged Ofgem to be “faster and more proactive in using its extensive powers” to safeguard consumers against overcharging in the future.
Energy UK piled further pressure on the regulator saying it is “important that the cap accurately reflects suppliers’ costs, most of which are out of their direct control”.
“Ofgem’s decision to raise the level of the prepayment cap last week shows how these costs can increase,” the trade group added.


text:
Premature babies—they’re fragile and need as much nutrition as possible, even more so than “regular babies” to gain the strength and energy they need to survive. While breast milk and formula milk are designed to give that proper nutrition, a premature baby’s underdeveloped gut makes it difficult to absorb proper nutrients from either milk substances. But according to Australian researchers, a different kind of milk may just be able to give premature babies the boost they need–wallaby milk.
That’s right, according to a team of researchers from Deakin University’s Institute for Technology in Melbourne, tamar wallabies (cousins to the Kangaroo) produce a milk contain special proteins that can actually help strengthen and repair a human premature baby’s gut, which ultimately means he or she will be able to obtain more nourishment.
That’s not to say that a premature baby’s new food source will come from wallabies. Instead it’s supposed to serve as a supplement to kick-start gut development so that babies can get all the beneficial value of their mother’s milk.
So don’t think you need to book your next flight Down Under tomorrow—researchers aren’t really encouraging the consumption of wallaby milk (which have also said to contain natural antibiotics). Rather, they are trying to identify the same wallaby milk proteins in humans so that they can discover a way to make human babies produce those identical proteins naturally. While research is only in its developmental stages, lead researcher Kevin Nicholas says he expects these proteins to be located in the fetus or placenta.
But for now health experts say just stick with the breast milk until further research has been concluded—breast milk contains colostrums, bunch of growth nutrients which are also high in protein, antibodies, carbohydrates but low in fat which is key (premature babies have a difficult time processing high-fat substances).


text:
Sarah Jessica Parker‘s sartorial choices are usually spot-on, but sometimes even the most flawless fashionista has a miss. That’s what appears to have happened to the I Don’t Know How She Does It star on Wednesday during an interview at a ladies luncheon at the Palladium in Melbourne, Australia.
Wearing a bronze Chanel tweed dress and Manolo Blahnik pumps, according to Red Carpet Fashion Awards, Parker chose to accessorize with a Philip Treacy hat that, while a work of art, possibly overwhelmed her small stature. Treacy, a famed British milliner, was responsible for several hats at the royal wedding in April, and recently helped elect the Duchess of Cambridge as the U.K.’s best-dressed star.
Down Under to support her latest film and celebrate the Melbourne Cup Carnival, Parker has stayed dependably stylish during this latest press tour — just as she did while promoting the movie throughout the U.S. and Europe earlier this year. So the hat — while possibly controversial to style watchers — is likely just a small mark on her otherwise top-notch fashion report card. Tell us: What do you think of Parker’s hat?//static.polldaddy.com/p/5635536.js Take Our Poll