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.

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.