Technology

BCE Inc. (TSX, NYSE: BCE) today announced the appointment of Gordon M. Nixon, CM, O. Ont., as a director of BCE and Bell Canada. Mr. Nixon will serve as a member of the Board’s Management Resources and Compensation Committee and the Corporate Governance Committee.

“Gord Nixon has earned a global reputation as one of Canada’s most distinguished and accomplished business leaders, and we are very gratified that he has accepted our invitation to the BCE Board. His unparalleled experience as chief executive of Canada’s largest financial institution, and his renowned commitment to sound corporate governance and strong risk management practices, will be tremendous assets to BCE shareholders,” said Tom O’Neill, Chair of the Board of BCE and Bell Canada.

President and Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Bank of Canada from August 2001 to August 2014, Mr. Nixon previously served as Chief Executive Officer of RBC Dominion Securities Inc. from December 1999 to April 2001. He is currently Chairman of MaRS, a not-for-profit organization that connects science, business and capital. Mr. Nixon also chairs the Queen’s University Capital Campaign, and in 2012 chaired the Ontario Premier’s Jobs and Prosperity Council.

Mr. Nixon has been awarded the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal. He is a recipient ofCanada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year Award and the Canadian Business Leader Award, is included in Barron’s list of the World’s Best CEOs, and is an Honouree of the Public Policy Forum. Both Queen’s University and Dalhousie University have conferred on Mr. Nixon the degree of Honorary Doctor of Laws. Mr. Nixon earned a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) degree from Queen’s University.

The Open Networking Lab, ON.Lab, today launched the revolutionary open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS) on behalf of the ONOS community of partners, contributors and end-users. The open source software will be released and available for download on Dec. 5 (see event details below). ONOS is a complete open source SDN network operating system that enables agile service creation and deployment at scale on any hardware, including white boxes. This disruptive platform delivers a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control, and service applications across mission critical networks.

Initially targeted to service providers, the community’s goal is to extend the platform for cloud service providers, enterprises and mainstream deployments. Founding members who are funding and contributing to the ONOS initiative include AT&T, NTT Communications, Ciena, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, NEC; and members who are collaborating and contributing to ONOS include Infoblox, SRI, Internet2, CNIT and Create-Net. Partners are looking forward to ONOS’ availability and embracing its initial uses. The availability of ONOS as an open source software will be a strong driver for the growth of its ecosystem and its continued successful evolution.

“By now, SDN is deployed in data centers worldwide, based on proprietary software,” said Scott Shenker, professor of CS at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Open Network Research Center. “The next frontier for SDN is service provider networks, where large network operators need to program their networks to create new, differentiated services. To enable this, we need a highly available, scalable control plane such as ONOS upon which new services can be instantiated and deployed.”

Since inception, ONOS has had the support and contributions of service providers. Targeted to mission critical networks, ONOS empowers providers to realize the true benefits of SDN by enabling the creation of optimized, agile and responsive network infrastructure. ONOS’ architecture delivers the network programmability, scalability, high availability and performance required to meet the needs of carrier-grade network environments. Tier 1 service provider partners such as AT&T and NTT Communications and several key vendors have supported the ONOS platform from its inception and continue to work with the community to deliver significant new use cases.

“Software-defined networking can radically reshape the wide area network,” said John Donovan, senior executive vice president, AT&T Technology & Operations. “The introduction of ONOS provides another open source SDN option designed for service provider networks with the potential to deliver the performance, scale, availability and core features that we value.”

ONOS is architected for ease of use in mission critical networks, providing a pure SDN approach to networking that is embraced by the open source community. By capitalizing on white box switches to reduce costs and managing them with SDN, service providers have the ability to allocate higher budgets to applications and business services while reducing spending on operations and maintenance.

“ONOS is built from scratch, from the ground-up, to be highly available, fast and extensible. It can be used to control existing equipment or new white boxes, allowing service providers to gain more control of their networks and reduce costs,” said Nick McKeown, professor of CS and EE at Stanford and faculty director of the Open Network Research Center.

ONOS also allows providers to gradually migrate their existing networks to SDN without requiring instant forklift upgrades by supporting a diversity of southbound devices and interfaces in addition to OpenFlow. With the potential to transform and reshape the networking environment, open source SDN delivers increased service innovation through a variety of applications developed and contributed by the open source community.

“NTT Communications and ON.Lab are well aligned in our goals for developing SDN for service provider networks,” said Yukio Ito, senior vice president and board member at NTT Communications. “We have been at the forefront of deploying SDN in carrier networks. We recognize the need for an open source network OS that provides carrier grade features to deliver carrier grade services. With ONOS’ northbound abstractions we now have an opportunity to develop control, management, and configuration applications quickly. We are excited to pilot use cases on ONOS in 2015.”

“ONOS is created with the idea of bringing a solid open source SDN platform to meet the needs of service providers and enterprises,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab. “We have achieved our objective of bringing, for the first time, a complete open source SDN OS that not only addresses the mission critical needs of service providers and enterprises but also delivers capabilities that enable developer and DevOps communities to create, operate and innovate on legacy networks and white boxes. ON.Lab is committed to driving the ONOS project based on open source best practices and bringing innovation and true SDN value to the community.”

Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: IMMY), a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of proprietary sterile and topical compounded drug formulations, today announced that it has entered into a distribution agreement with MD Distributor, Corp. (MDD).  Under the agreement, MDD has the rights to market, sell and distribute Imprimis’ patent-pending Go Dropless™ formulations and other ophthalmic formulations in Puerto Rico.  In addition, the agreement also covers the Dominican Republic and countries in the Caribbean once regulatory approvals are obtained.  MDD represents leading healthcare companies and its experienced sales and marketing professionals are primarily focused in the specialty areas of ophthalmology and dermatology.

“The MDD team is excited to join forces with Imprimis and we look forward to introducing Go Dropless formulations to our growing ophthalmologist customer base in Puerto Rico,” stated Ricardo Diaz, President of MD Distributor.  “We plan to immediately start calling on the estimated 100 ocular surgeons and surgical centers that perform an estimated 25,000 cataract procedures each year inPuerto Rico to educate them on the benefits of Dropless surgery.  We also believe that Imprimis’ other ophthalmic formulations will be prescribed in additional surgeries, including refractive, retina and glaucoma procedures. Physicians in Puerto Rico, like elsewhere, need state-of-the-art unique solutions to improve their practices, and create enhanced experiences for their patients.  We believe Imprimis’ Go Dropless formulations will meet this need.”

“MDD is an ideal partner for us as they have developed long-standing relationships with leading ophthalmic surgeons in Puerto Rico,” stated Mark L. Baum, CEO of Imprimis.  We have already started working with the MDD team to prepare for the kickoff of the Go Dropless education and marketing campaign, which is expected to commence over the next few weeks.  We are committed to increasing physician adoption of our Dropless formulations across the US and its territories and having representation in Puerto Ricowill help us with this mission.”

Imprimis believes that its proprietary formulations have a broad application in ophthalmic surgery, including the multi-billion dollar global cataract surgery drug market.  Cataract surgery is one of the most common surgical procedures, and a 2013 Market Scope report estimates that 22 million procedures were performed globally in 2013¹. The World Health Organization predicts that by the year 2020, more than 32 million cataract surgeries will take place globally on an annual basis and the global ophthalmic drug market is expected to grow to $21.6 billion by 2018.  According to the National Eye Institute, over 24 million Americans have cataracts and due to various factors including the growing aging population, this number is expected to grow to 38 million by 2030 and expected to more than double to over 50 million by the year 2050.

SmartScore^TM aggregates data from six categories – price, schedule, comfort, in-flight entertainment, on-board Wi-Fi and fuel economy. These categories are calculated to create SmartScore^TM, a single data point that rates the overall quality of each flight. SmartScore^TM is seamlessly integrated as an icon on the Directflights.com web site. Its varying color and numeric value make it easy to spot the very best flights at a glance. Clicking on SmartScore^TM reveals detailed information on comfort, amenities and fuel economy, thereby allowing travelers to select the flight that best matches their specific needs.

As Rob Stross, Directflights.com MD, states, “Whist delivering the best price as a meta search site is critical, we also recognize the need to look at the added value elements essential when booking a flight. This is exactly what our users are looking for and the partnership with Calasi allows us to deliver this seamlessly. If you’re 6 foot four and traveling long-haul, a few dollars extra is a small price to pay for more legroom. The new SmartScore^TM function allows you to pick and choose accordingly.”

Dirk Aguilar, Calasi’s President and Co-Founder, continues, “Leisure travelers prefer watching films over reading an in-flight magazine. And business travelers readily catch up with email when Wi-Fi is available. Through our partnership with Directflights.com we are presenting such valuable information to travelers at a time when they are still planning their trips. In doing so, we are enabling informed decisions and dramatically improving the travel experience.”

Directflights.com is part of Worldwide Media Direct PLC. Directflights.com is the UK-based flights and holiday comparison site, comparing live prices for over 500 airlines and 250,000 hotels globally. Calasi was founded to help travelers find the perfect flight on their favorite travel sites. Rich content and dynamic decision assistance are delivered through web services APIs in real time. Former employees of Google, AOL, Sun Microsystems and The Climate Corporation established the San Francisco based start-up in 2012.

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.