|
|
Weekly News Digest
 |
August 6, 2015 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
|
V2COM Moves Into U.S. Market
V2COM, a Brazilian Internet of Things (IoT) platform and smart grid solutions provider, has entered the U.S. market with its first American headquarters in Austin, Texas. During the past 10 years, the company has delivered more than 1 million connected devices to customers around the world. It plans to create 100 new jobs over the next 3 years.“Our expansion is already giving us the kind of visibility and capacity to focus on building relationships with U.S. clients in need of our innovative and individualized IoT offerings,” says Guilherme Spina, V2COM’s founder and CEO. “Ultimately, our goal is to provide our clients and partners with customized solutions designed to eliminate IoT complexity, freeing manufacturers and businesses to focus on their core expertise.” For more information, read the press release.
The USDA and Microsoft Present a Data-Centric Food Resiliency Challenge
The USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) and Microsoft launched the Innovation Challenge contest, which encourages the creation of applications and tools for analyzing open data (from sources such as the USDA’s datasets hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing platform) to explore how climate change will impact the U.S.’s food supply and how the country can achieve better food resiliency. The contest will award $60,000 in prizes, with a top prize of $25,000 for a participant who uses USDA data to give farmers, agriculture businesses, scientists, or consumers actionable insights. Additionally, university researchers and students will be granted cloud-computing awards from Microsoft. The contest deadline for entries is Nov. 20, 2015. For more information, read the press release.
WT Cox Helps Schools Access Digital Magazines
WT Cox teamed up with Recorded Books to give K–12 schools access to digital magazines via Zinio for Libraries. Popular titles are available individually or as a collection, such as Highlights, Seventeen, American Girl, Popular Science, and National Geographic. WT Cox gives the schools purchasing options of print, electronic, and digital access with consolidated billing so they can continue to use their existing systems and workflows.For more information, read the press release.
Jisc Supports OA Efforts in Higher Education
Jisc will work with universities and researchers to help meet requirements for open access (OA) in response to Research Councils UK (RCUK) reviewing its OA policy and HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) updating OA requirements.“There are many benefits offered from an OA model, increased author visibility and improved accessibility to research outputs to name a few. But with such … new and evolving systems we need to get the infrastructure in place to ensure researchers and universities gain the maximum benefit,” says Neil Jacobs, Jisc’s head of scholarly communications support. Jisc will use the RCUK and HEFCE documents to build this infrastructure. For more information, read the press release.
Google+ Plans to Enhance and Rearrange Its Features
Google announced that it will be making changes to Google+ in the coming months. These include moving features around—e.g., many elements of Google+ Photos are now part of the Google Photos app—and adding location sharing to Hangouts and other apps, as well as separating users’ Google+ profile from their identity in all other Google products. It also recently launched Google+ Collections as a hub for sharing posts organized around topics. For more information, read the blog post.
Deep Web Technologies Rolls Out Updated Search Service
Deep Web Technologies upgraded its Explorit Everywhere! search technology to a platform-driven service that has a solid foundation for future enhancements. It now has greater agility for supporting features such as search widgets, suggestion services, mobility, and scalability. Other updates include a MyLibrary feature, user interface text in multiple languages, and the addition of responsive design to allow for mobile use.For more information, read the press release.
Plum Analytics Debuts Five New Products
Plum Analytics released the PlumX Suite of five products for helping its customers choose the tools they need. They are:- PlumX Metrics, which helps libraries get more value from their institutional repository
- PlumX Dashboards, which helps researchers understand the impact of their research beyond citation information
- PlumX +Grants, which gives grant makers, foundations, and research institutions insight into the impact and ROI of the grants they fund or receive
- PlumX Benchmarks, which compares institutions based on Plum Analytics’ categories of metrics
- PlumX Funding Opportunities, which helps users find funding opportunities from popular U.S. sources
For more information, read the press release.
Springer Nature Stacks Its Humanities Portfolio
Springer Nature acquired German humanities publisher J.B. Metzler. It is part of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (which owns Macmillan Science and Education) and will retain its own branding.The acquisition enhances Springer Nature’s international humanities portfolio. J.B. Metzler will benefit from Springer Nature’s experience as a market leader and from its parallel publishing of print and electronic editions of a title. For more information, read the press release.
Organizations Introduce New Do Not Track Policy for Internet Browsing
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with a coalition of partners, introduced a stronger Do Not Track (DNT) policy standard for web browsing that aims to protect users from having their internet activity recorded. The policy works with ad-blocker and other technologies to ensure that users can opt out from online tracking.“Our hope is that this new DNT approach will protect a consumer’s right to privacy and incentivize advertisers to respect user choice, paving a path that allows privacy and advertising to coexist,” says Casey Oppenheim, founder and CEO of Disconnect, one of EFF’s partners on this project. For more information, read the press release.
The Open Data Institute’s Open Data Award Finalists
The Open Data Institute’s (ODI) Open Data Awards, which celebrate global innovation and excellence in open data usage, chose this year’s finalists in the following five categories:- Business award—for open data used to transform business
- Innovation award—for open data used as a tool for innovation, in any sector
- Social Impact award—for open data used as a tool for social good
- Individual Champion award—for an outstanding individual pioneer of open data
- Publisher award—for high publishing standards and use of challenging data
For more information, visit the website.
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
|
