Business

Turboden, a leading company in the production of Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) turbo-generators for distributed power generation employing renewable sources and waste heat, a group company of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. (MHI), implemented the first ORC-based heat recovery plant on an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) in the world. The new 3 MW electrical output ORC unit exploits a portion of the saturated steam produced and recovers heat from the exhaust gases downstream an EAF at ESF (Elbe-Stahlwerke Feralpi GmbH), one of the Europe’s most qualified iron and steel manufacturers, located in Riesa, Germany.

The heat recovery system was started up on December 2013. It is connected to the off-gas treatment system of the melting electric furnace. The recovered energy reduces the net power consumption, allowing significant CO₂ reduction.

In addition to electricity production, the remaining portion of the steam is fed into the Riesa Municipal steam supply system and used in a nearby tire factory production process.

Turboden, a pioneer in ORC technology, designs, develops and implements generation plants, allowing reduction of industrial energy consumption and emissions containment through heat recovery from unexploited residual heat streams and exhaust gases in production processes and power plants.

This technology is best applied in energy-intensive industries such as glass, cement, aluminum, iron & steel, where production processes typically generate exhaust gases above 250°C.

These new plants not only provide advantages in terms of environmental sustainability, emissions reduction, increased industrial process efficiency and improved business performance, but they also represent opportunities for increased competitiveness.

Since 2007, Turboden has designed and implemented 34 power plants for heat recovery in Germany, Belgium, Romania, Slovakia,Italy, Finland, Austria, Turkey, Morocco, Canada, United States and Singapore, with additional plants under construction in Germany,Italy, France, Turkey, Romania, Canada and Russia.

According to the Energy Efficiency Report 2012, a study conducted by the Politecnico di Milano on energy efficiency in industrial processes, the estimated potential of electricity produced through ORC-based heat recovery technology could financially benefitEurope with up to 8 billion Euros with about 2.5 GW saved power implying a CO₂ reduction of almost 7.5 million tons.

Index, a leading retail software company that brings the personalization and measurement of online commerce to the offline world, announced today that it is deploying across all New Seasons Market (NSM) stores to deliver end-to-end security and personalized customer experiences.

A leading natural foods grocer in the Pacific Northwest, New Seasons Market operates 15 stores in the Portland–Vancouver area and recently acquired Santa Cruz-based New Leaf Community Markets, with eight locations in California’s Central Coast region.

The collaboration with Index provides NSM with a real-time understanding of customer behavior while helping to deliver relevant product recommendations and shopping experiences that savvy consumers now expect both online and offline.

“Index not only helps us implement industry-leading security for our customers’ data, but also helps us deliver personalized shopping experiences,” says Wendy Collie, New Seasons Market’s CEO. “What we are most excited about is that Index delivers incredible value to our customers without the time and cost-intensive need to replace existing systems. Our customers are very important to us and we always look for new ideas to enhance their shopping experience with us.”

Index integrates directly with NSM’s existing PIN pads, improving NSM’s security and helping to tailor the checkout experience for each customer. Index’s Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) protects payment card data from the moment a card is swiped, ensuring complete end-to-end security and providing a range of value-add services. Index will also help NSM to support EMV, the global smartcard security standard that is rolling out in the US next year.

In addition, Index enables New Seasons Market to dynamically update PIN pad content through a simple web interface that enhances and personalizes the checkout experience. For instance, it will enable customers to optionally receive emailed receipts instead of paper copies. Index provides an opt-in on the PIN pad for those shoppers.

Index has integrated directly with NSM’s existing technologies, from point-of-sale platform, Toshiba SurePOS, to PIN pads, Verifone MX 915 and MX 925, and serves as a certified gateway to NSM’s chosen payment processor, First Data. By teaming up with NSM’s industry leading partners, Index adds new value alongside existing solutions.

“There’s a scientific-approach to improving the grocery shopping experience. Online retailers test, learn and constantly improve customer experiences and we’re excited to empower brick-and-mortar leaders like New Seasons Market with that same capability,” says Index Co-founder and CEO Marc Freed-Finnegan. “Index provides a layered approach to security to ensure the highest level of protection for New Seasons Market customers. A good customer experience starts with security,” adds Index Co-founder Jonathan Wall.

Polar, maker’s of MediaVoice, the platform trusted by many of the world’s largest publishers to create, serve, and scale their native advertising, and Moat, a SaaS analytics company focused on building products for brand advertisers and premium publishers, have partnered to provide analytics to premium publishers including viewability and attention metrics in content and native advertising.

The partnership lets Polar’s MediaVoice customers leverage Moat’s enhanced analytics, strengthening the market-leading reporting features already integrated within the platform. Some of the advanced metrics MediaVoice users access through the partnership include viewability, in-view time, universal interaction rate, hover rate, time to hover, scroll rate, and many others.

“Moat is excited to partner with Polar and provide another powerful integration of Moat Analytics to our clients,” says Aniq Rahman, Moat’s President. “We already share many customers with Polar – grouping native advertising and content analytics for brands creates a new opportunity for publishers to tell a story to marketers about how readers experience sponsored content.”

“MediaVoice has grown exponentially over the past year, now having served over 3-billion direct-sold native ads for premium publishers,” says Polar’s vice president of product, Rahul Nirula. “This explosive growth is proof sponsored content programs are scaling. Publishers need to chart their success and Moat’s industry-leading analytics platform fills that need perfectly.”

Polar and Moat’s customers like The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail are already seeing value from this partnership.

“Clients using BrandConnect look to our team to help create and deliver high quality content programs our audience will engage with. Combining the data and storytelling power of Moat with the innovative native technology from Polar, helps us tell a stronger story to our clients on how their content programs are performing,” says Jeff Burkett, Senior Director of Sales Operations and Product Strategy at the Washington Post. WP BrandConnect is The Washington Post’s sponsored content program.

The Randstad Technologies Employee Confidence Index, a measure of overall confidence among technology workers, reached the highest level ever recorded in the Index’s nine-year history, increasing from 58.7 in Q2 2014 to 61.7 this quarter. The study, conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of talent and solutions provider Randstad Technologies, showed technology workers’ confidence in the strength of the economy rebounded significantly this quarter, with nearly half (43%) believing the economy is getting stronger. In addition, the Randstad Macroeconomic Confidence Index, which measures employees’ confidence in the overall strength of the economy, increased dramatically from 47.4 last quarter to 52.4 this quarter—the highest level among all other professions surveyed. The study was conducted in July, August and September of 2014 among 189 U.S. IT workers aged 18 and older.

Also this quarter, IT workers are more confident about their own personal employment situation, including the availability of jobs and their ability to find new employment. Nearly four-in-10 (38%) IT workers believe there are more jobs available this quarter, while more than half (56%) are confident in their ability to find a new job. Not surprisingly, many more IT employees say they are likely to look for a new job this quarter, with 40 percent of IT professionals indicating they are willing to job hunt in the next year, an 11 percentage point increase from the second quarter of 2014.

“It is encouraging to see confidence levels among all IT workers reaching unprecedented heights,” says Bob Dickey, Group President of Technology and Engineering at Randstad. “Employers must keep in mind that with more confidence in the job market comes more likelihood of job mobility, a challenge when many organizations are already struggling with finding the right IT talent to drive business goals and innovation. In fact, a recent Gartner report on CIO Agenda 2014/2015, finds 51 percent of CIOs are concerned that the digital torrent is coming faster than they can cope, and 42 percent don’t feel they have the right skills and capabilities in place to face this future.”

According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, one often overlooked solution to the IT skills shortage is to recruit more women into the profession. The organization cites that there are roughly 1.2 million computing jobs projected to be available by 2022, yet U.S. universities are producing only 39 percent of the graduates needed to fill them. Meanwhile, the National Center for Education Statistics forecasts a total of 13.5 million female college students in 2020 compared to just under 9.5 million males. In addition, a recent New York Times article reported that women hold only 25 percent of IT jobs, and roughly half will eventually quit to pursue a completely different line of work.

Adtegrity (Pink Sheets: ADTY), a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based company specializing in Internet advertising networks and services, today reported its results for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, 2014.

The Company’s unaudited results included net income of $80,892 for the third quarter on revenues of $4.3 million, compared with a net income of $419,215 on revenues of $5.03 million for the same quarter last year.

“Unfortunately, our recent investments in headcount didn’t translate to improvements in our financial performance.  We have also experienced slower-than-expected market growth in political ad spending for the year.  At the same time, we believe we have a solid plan, we remain profitable and we are optimistic that we will see increased sales momentum as we move forward,” said Adtegrity President and CEO Scott Brew. “We remain focused on taking Adtegrity to the next level of performance, and will continue to invest in growing the company.”

Adtegrity reported serving more than 47.6 billion ad impressions during the third quarter, resulting in 27.9 million clicks and 395,000 conversions for Adtegrity advertisers.

Adtegrity’s primary business is the delivery of interactive advertising and marketing services. Since its founding in 1999, the Company has established itself as a results-driven, customer-focused firm providing consistent quality to the top advertising brands online.  Adtegrity currently delivers billions of advertisements across thousands of top-tier websites each month.

The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) announced today the launch of its recruitment for the inaugural class of the newly developed Master of Technology Management Program, set to begin in the Fall of 2015.

UC Santa Barbara’s Master of Technology Management Program (MTM), a selective nine-month immersive master’s degree program, is designed to catapult highly qualified, early-career engineers and scientists into leadership positions within established and start-up technology companies by developing critical management skills.

Utilizing a synchronous customer and product development process, this unique, competitive program was developed in tandem with the recruitment of practiced professors, and engagement with brand-name technology companies with interest in employing graduates who will have developed both technical and management skills.

“Companies are recognizing the need for candidates with a hybrid of technical and management proficiencies,” explained Robert York, Chair of the Management Technology Program at UCSB. “We are thrilled to offer students the opportunity to accelerate their careers, prepare themselves for real-life working environments, and an on-ramp to prospective employer.”

UCSB employed SyncDev, Inc. a company that coaches cross-functional teams to develop customers and products simultaneously, to support its faculty and student-recruitment team to develop their student and corporate ‘customer funnel’ while developing the MTM Program. Using SyncDev’s sell-design-build method, UCSB’s team fostered relationships with technology companies, garnering vital information about which skills and experience are important, and used the results to help recruit additional faculty and define its curriculum.

“We are honored to work with a top institution on this game changing educational experience,” said SyncDev CEO, Frank Robinson. “By tapping into those who make hiring decisions, students will gain the most tailored education available.”

The differentiation of this Masters of Technology Management program lies in its narrow focus, which is designed to accelerate graduates’ career trajectory by years.  While most MBA programs are constructed to provide a breadth of skills to create managers from any background for a variety of administrative, operational, and finance roles, the MTM program is structured to admit only candidates with an interest in gaining the framework, skills, and applied knowledge necessary to become a leader in technology-based companies.