Tetra Pak has strengthened its product offering for ice cream manufacturers with the acquisition of Big Drum Engineering GmbH, a leading supplier of filling machines for the industry.

The deal further extends the company’s ability to provide end-to-end solutions for food and beverage companies around the world, and reinforces its global leadership in the sector.

Tetra Pak already provides a full range of ice cream equipment, including raw material storage, mix preparation, continuous freezing and inclusion systems, as well as production solutions for moulded and extruded ice cream products. The acquisition of Big Drum will strengthen the company’s presence in the “filled” ice cream segment (e.g. tubs and cones) which represent approximately half of the global packaged ice cream market.

Monica Gimre, Executive Vice President, Processing Systems at Tetra Pak said: “This acquisition means we can now provide an even more extensive range of production solutions for ice cream manufacturers and expand our collaboration with them. This, in turn, will allow us to deliver even greater value, by securing efficiencies in technical service across a number of different lines, and offering portfolio-wide support to their product development and marketing activities.”

Big Drum, which is based in Edertal, Germany, is a leading provider of medium-to-high capacity filling machines for the global ice cream market. It is a highly-respected supplier to major brands, and is recognized for its innovation, quality, and performance.

Hans-Peter Trosse and Matthias Ruppert, Managing Directors of Big Drum, jointly stated: “We see significant growth opportunities through Tetra Pak. We are convinced that we will be able to provide stronger support to our customers, thanks to Tetra Pak’s worldwide presence, extensive sales and service channels, technical support and expertise in food manufacturing.”

Following the acquisition, all Big Drum managers and employees will remain with the company at their current location.​

| A TetraPak BigDrum Release  ||  October 4,  2017   |||

#4 - The privacy hysteria floated into political life in the 1970s with the widespread introduction of computerisation in the public sector notably in two quite divergent areas – crime and health. The fervour was largely whipped up from Australia and as each waved peaked public sector administrators would ask “who has been over?”

The position nowFacebook and all the other “social media” have reversed this position as whole sectors of the community cannot tell people they have never actually met enough about themselves. What was considered highly personal and thus confidential as recently as the 1990s is now willingly, and indeed, enthusiastically surrendered into cyberspace. It is not understood by many users that in the photos and news they happily transmit about their jobs, dogs, holiday, relatives, state of health, and curious absences that they are in fact freely and enthusiastically transmitting information that was the subject of the panic at the end of the last century.

| MSC Newswire Big Frights of Our Times Series #4  || Friday 13 October 2017   |||

German's largest airlines, Lufthansa, is investing into an ICO pre-sale and teaming up with a Swiss startup on bookings on Ethereum.

One of Europe's leading airlines, Lufthansa, will be buying into an ICOs and teaming up with a startup on bookings on the blockchain. Winding Tree, a Swiss-based startup, is building a marketplace on the ethereum blockchain to connect businesses and suppliers. The deal between was announced today. Together with Lufthansa Group, the pair is exploring a decentralized booking platform.

The two companies met through Lufthansa's Innovation Hub. Both firms view this collaboration as an overall win-win. Lufthansa hopes to bring on board its expertise in customer experience from the airline industry while benefiting from Winding Trees blockchain development.

CEO of Winding Tree, Maksim Izmaylov shared their intentions to help the German airline build and deploy blockchain- powered travel apps on that align with the industry's standards. Lufthansa will provide Maksim's development team with access to APIs.

Markus Binkert, Senior Vice President Distribution & Revenue Management Lufthansa Group Airlines explained the goal of API integrations via press release:

"By integrating these APIs with Winding Tree's public blockchain, Lufthansa Group enables all innovative partners who develop cutting-edge travel applications to access these offers via a decentralized and intermediate-free travel marketplace."

The largest German airline is exploring customer service applications on the blockchain including bookings, and itinerary travel information. Lufthansa is on the forefront of exploring use cases for the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies for its aviation business. The scalability and efficiency of blockchains are features it can explore both customer service and aircraft maintenance. Last year, the firm launched a Blockchain for Aviation (BC4A) initiative aimed at evaluating innovative technology for flight maintenance.Lufthansa Buys into Pre-Sale ICO

Winding Tree is in the process of launching an initial coin offering (ICO) to fund development. As part of their commitment to this partnership, Lufthansa will finance part of the token sale at the ICO pre-sale stage. Investors will receive native ‘Lif' cryptocurrency in exchange for their contributions.

More startups are turning to ICOs for capital, the latest cryptocurrency crowdfunding craze. Typically, investors make contributions via cryptocurrency and receive issued tokens representing some form of right or utility. But in more recent times, the model has opened up avenues for Hedge funds and private investors to participate at a pre-ICO stage.

Lufthansa's buy-in to Winding Tree's pre-sale is likely to contribute regular currency. Regulatory warnings on ICO funding have picked up over the course of the last few months. It is becoming harder for startups to skirt rules on securities laws.

The LIF crypto token will have utility on the marketplace. Businesses and suppliers will settle payments and transfer of data relating to accommodation, flights, and cruises on the blockchain using Lif.

Dr. Christian Langer, Chief Digital Officer of Lufthansa Group, said: "To us, Winding Tree is a strong candidate to turn today's understanding of distribution upside down."

|  A Cryptovest release  ||   October 12,   2017   |||

An ownership dispute over proposed milk processing facilities in Southland has hit the courts, with a jilted group of investors claiming to have missed out on a major opportunity to tap the Chinese market worth at least $227 million.

The tussle harks back to September 2014 when Brian Wagstaff and Richard Young set up a company called Danpac (NZ) to build and run an infant formula factory and hold a minority interest in a site for a proposed milk powder processing factory that was to be owned by Mataura Valley Milk. They entered into a heads of agreement with Randolph van der Burgh and Geoffrey Pollard, Pure Elite Holdings, PEF New Zealand and Ever Health New Zealand that both parties would pour capital into the entity to build a dairy exporter targeting China.

Neither group ended up injecting their capital and Wagstaff and Young took back control of the entity, later amalgamating Danpac with another entity Bodco Ltd, which counts Chinese state-owned enterprise China Animal Husbandry Group as its biggest shareholder, bankrolling the processing plant.

A September 25 judgment in the High Court in Hamilton shows van der Burgh, Pollard and the PEH group of companies claim the agreement didn't have a fixed timeframe meaning delays to capitalise Danpac didn't breach the deal, and that the moves to push them out were themselves breach of the heads of agreement. They estimate their loss to be at least $55m from being deprived of the equity stake in Danpac, and at least $227m in lost value, the judgment said.

| Continue to red full article on TheCountry here   ||  October 12,  2017   |||

#3 - This scare was the harbinger of all the other panics on ingestibles that continues today. The background was that New Zealanders short, but fast flowing waterways failed to collect the minerals required for healthy teeth. The result was that New Zealand teeth were among the worst in the developed world requiring among other things mass adult extractions and huge purpose built dental clinics for children

The position nowThe unselfish insistence by the dental profession that fluoride had to be introduced to the public water supply brought this situation under control. Unselfish because it did the dentists out of much of their business. The anti-fluoride campaign is now associated with the extremes of the Greens.

| MSC Newswire Big Frights of Our Times Series #3  || Thursday 12 October 2017   |||

Tracking aircraft maintenance just got easier through Spidertracks' cloud partnership with Aeronet writes Rob O'Neill in Reseller News.

Two New Zealand aviation technology developers have teamed to tackle one of the most complex and time-consuming problems in aviation: tracking and automating aircraft maintenance and flight logging.

Spidertracks, based in Auckland's Karangahape Road, already manufactures and sells on-board satellite tracking devices, dubbed "Spiders", though a global network of resellers.

Now it has teamed with Cambridge-based cloud fleet management software company Aeronet to automate the tracking process and eliminate reams of paper, ad hoc spreadsheets and manual data entry.

The new service, prosaically called Maintenance Tracking, uses data from the Spiders integrated with Aeronet’s API.

"It takes all of the admin out of what was once tedious and time-consuming and puts that time and effort back into the hands of operators, allowing them to focus on maximising productivity and growing their businesses," Spidertracks says in a blog post.

Fixed-wing aircraft equipped with Spiders just need to be signed up sign up for Maintenance Tracking while helicopters need a new Spider 8 device.

Spidertracks and Aeronet launched Maintenance Tracker at the National Business Aviation Association conference in Las Vegas this week.

Spidertracks’ chief marketing officer Todd O’Hara said allowing Spider Events and Maintenance Tracking to automate this area of customers’ operations means they have one less moving part to keep tabs on.

“For most operators, the data is already there. It was just a case of finding what else we were able to do with it that would provide more value to our customers," he said.

An early user, Canada-based flight training, aircraft charter, aircraft maintenance, and pipeline surveillance operation Synergy Aviation, said the system allowed maintenance to be performed "live".

“This is the only software I’ve found that works for helicopter operations where maintenance is regularly performed in the field," said Synergy director of maintenance Marc Hanatschek.

Spidertracks’ CEO Dave Blackwell said Maintenance Tracker was a milestone towards providing a broader range of services for customers.There’s been an increasing desire from customers to use Spider data to provide more value for their businesses, he said.

“We see a lot of examples where aircraft operators are having to work in disparate systems and duplicate data entry in an effort to get the job done. What we’re doing here is automating these work flows and integrating systems to provide greater efficiency and more reliable data, which will ultimately deliver significant cost savings.”

Spidertracks was founded by James McCarthy and other family members and associates after it took two weeks to find the pilot following a 2005 helicopter crash.

Those interests still own most of the company supported by a 16.5 per cent investment from The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall's venture investment company K One W One alongside other smaller shareholdings.

Aeronet is deveolped by Module Limited, which also privately owned

| A REsellerNews release  ||  October 11,  2017   |||

#2 - The notion of a world capsized by the weight of its uncontrolled population growth overlapped with the nuclear war fear. It began to dissipate during the 1960s with the advent of readily-available contraceptive science. Yet later in the last century is began to pick up renewed momentum through reports of population expansion in Africa and Asia.

The position now Recognition of this and action in Asia, most famously in China, has allayed these fears. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation report, the most recent comprehensive one on the topic indicates that world population is now stabilising. The population “bomb” syndrome is a rare panic in that it can be ascribed to a single person instead of to a collective. In New Zealand in 2013, Paul Ehrlich, his explosive deadlines still far behind him, nonetheless clung to his original postulation.

| Big Frights of Our Times MSC Newswire Series #2  || Wednesday  10 October 2017   |||

#1 - This was the first of the post World War 2 panics. It held that as a staunch Western ally, New Zealand would become a casualty of any nuclear war between the United States and the USSR.

The position now

According to USSR deep penetration agent Kim Philby, by now a KGB colonel in Moscow, New Zealand’s anti nuclear stance meant that it was removed from the USSR’s list of targets. Thus confirming that New Zealand, until its anti-nuclear era , a staunch United States ally, had been on it in the first place.  This threat, the most realistic in our series,  has recently resurrected itself  in the form of the North Korea rogue state and its ability

| Big Frights of Our Times MSC Newswire Series #1  ||  Tuesday 10 October 2017   |||

New Zealand Ambassador to the Philippines David Strachan expects stronger ties between his country and Cebu as the two parties further explore opportunities in trade, tourism and education.

At a time when the people-to-people links between New Zealand and the Philippines are burgeoning, Strachan led an 11-strong New Zealand delegation to Cebu to look into potential areas of collaboration.

“We continue to strengthen our ties and explore partnerships that would be beneficial for Cebu and New Zealand,” he said in a roundtable discussion with local media at the Cebu City Marriott Hotel last Friday.

According to Strachan, 80 percent of New Zealand exporters are small and medium enterprises who could be the right match for Cebu-based entrepreneurs.

He said New Zealand is exploring potential investments on food and beverage, wood processing and furniture as well as information technology innovations.

Investments

Hernando Banal, the New Zealand trade commissioner, said they see a sustained entry of investments particularly into the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.

Aside from the BPO sector, he said New Zealand is also looking for collaborative projects in renewable energy, especially since the country is known for geothermal power sources.

Banal said the bilateral trade of the Philippines and New Zealand has been growing, registering $1 billion in trade value in the last five years, making the Philippines the 15th largest export destination for New Zealand.

He added that Philippine companies are also investing in firms in New Zealand, particularly those involved in food and food processing.

New Zealand boasts of a large Filipino community, with more than one percent or about 6,000 of the country’s population being Filipinos and making it the fastest growing Asian community there.

Tourism

Steven Dixon, Tourism New Zealand regional manager, meanwhile, said more Filipinos now see New Zealand as a travel destination.

They expect more Filipinos to travel to New Zealand as Philippines Airlines is set to launch a non-stop service between Manila and Auckland starting December.

“This decision by PAL would inject greater momentum into the fast growing two-way tourist flows,” he said.

Around 28,000 New Zealanders travel from New Zealand to the Philippines while 23,000 Filipinos travel to New Zealand every year, mostly for business, incentives, as well as visiting family and friends.

Education

Education New Zealand Regional Director John Laxon, for his part, said Cebu is becoming a promising education market for New Zealand.

He said that more than 1,000 students have registered for the New Zealand Education Fair hosted by Golden Summit Immigration Consultancy held at the Cebu City Marriott Hotel last Oct. 7.

“Filipinos pursuing their education in New Zealand are learning from some of the best education institutions in the world. They earn degrees that are internationally recognized. This gives them an advantage in pursuing their careers in the Philippines or elsewhere around the world,” Laxon said.

More than 4,000 Filipino students study in New Zealand, making the Philippines the fifth largest sources of international students worldwide.

Year to date, the number of Filipino students choosing to study in New Zealand universities has risen by 35 percent in 2017 compared to the same period last year.

The popular degree programs among Filipinos, Laxon said, are those related to management and commerce as well as health studies, animation, cyber security and ICT.

| A TravelWireNews release  ||  October 8,  2017   |||

New Zealand software innovator CS-VUE has enhanced an environmental compliance management system for one of the country’s largest infrastructure projects – the NZ Transport Agency’s $709.5m motorway from Pūhoi to Warkworth. It is the first stage of the Ara Tūhono – Pūhoi to Wellsford Road of National Significance.

It’s a long way from where it all began. In 2004 the software start-up business was created to help the former Auckland City Council better manage its stormwater consents.

CS-VUE has since grown in staff, clients and turnover. In recent years, work includes providing software to manage the New Zealand Transport Agency’s operational network and capital project consents. Roads of National Significance projects can involve hundreds of consents across multiple teams and construction areas, with work often staged.

The Transport Agency says prior to using CS-VUE’s software to help manage their consent conditions and compliance, they relied on a range of spreadsheet-type systems that differed from contract to contract.

When the Transport Agency’s second Public Private Partnership (PPP) Pūhoi to Warkworth was in the procurement phase, CS-VUE General Manager Wayne Fisher got a phone call.

“I recall they wanted us to design some enhancements to the software and quickly,” he laughs. “We were thrilled for the call up. It was scoped, designed and built in time for the award of the contract to Northern Express Group (NX2).”

Mr Fisher says with construction underway, their software module is now doing its job and will continue to well after the four-lane motorway opens because many of the consents are ongoing, as is monitoring and compliance.

Known as their ‘Two Step Sign Off’ module, CS-VUE has built in extra capability and better data exchange to effectively allow “two-way conversations” between the consent holder and its contractors and the regulator, Auckland Council.

“Normally a consent holder would rely solely on its contractors to ensure every consent was being monitored and complied with. Our module gives the Transport Agency direct oversight and Auckland Council instant access to the status of consents with the ability to directly sign them off.”

Graham Jones, Senior Monitoring Officer at Auckland Council’s Resource Consents department says: “To the best of my knowledge this is the first time the regulator has shared a common platform with both the consent holder, the NZ Transport Agency and the contractor, NX2. All parties having access to common software allows us all to be on the same page at any instant in time on the status of conditions. As a project team, it allows us to work in a more collaborative manner.”

Tom Newson, NZTA’s Principal Project Manager, says: “As a PPP, the Pūhoi to Warkworth conditions require input and oversight from the three key parties during construction and once in service to ensure compliance and management of the outcomes-based consents set by the Board of Inquiry in 2014. CS-VUE’s new system provides all parties with quick access and a single source of truth via a two-step validation process with Auckland Council. We’re using it as a pilot with a view to using the same CS-VUE application on other large roading infrastructure projects, such as East West Link and the Northern Corridor improvements.”

Mr Fisher says with the 18.5km motorway scheduled to open by 2022, having a cloud-based environmental compliance management system that each party can access 24/7 not only means greater transparency, which helps to avoid any breaches and saves time.”

CS-VUE is proud of its role with the Pūhoi to Warkworth PPP, which will ultimately help in the Northern Express Group’s construction, management and maintenance of the motorway for the five-year construction and its further 25-year operational period.

“The Transport Agency is a massive government agency with a huge work programme. They’re also champions of innovation. As a New Zealand-owned and operated software business, we’re delighted to be working alongside them on a daily basis. It just goes to show there is room for local products and suppliers if they can deliver and keep up.”

Mr Newson says the Pūhoi to Warkworth outcome-based RMA conditions provide greater flexibility to the contractor in both design and construction than most other Transport Agency projects. It also requires vigilance from a compliance standpoint.

CS-VUE is also working with about 20 percent of the country’s district and city councils ensuring they keep on top of their often complex and lengthy consents granted by regional councils. For Auckland Council, CS-VUE manages its stormwater and contaminated land sites.

“Our clients have achieved great results around improving information accuracy and auditability. We provide tools to achieve better business analytics and we can reduce an organisation’s annual operating costs.

Board directors prick up their ears when we talk about improvements to governance, risk and compliance. While helping to keep the rates down seems to resonate with council procurement managers. Our products actually offer many tangible advantages.”

He says public and private entities also respond positively to the concept of resilience and keeping critical information safe from the likes of earthquakes, floods or fires. CS-VUE achieves this as its software is entirely cloud-based, putting everything in one place for easy management, and no capital expenditure on hardware is required.

CS-VUE also manages and tracks resource consents for big infrastructure players and heavy industry. Most consents being managed are around air discharge, water, land use, and trade waste, or consents issued by NZ Petroleum & Minerals for extraction. Sectors include oil and gas, quarrying, mining, and some of the country’s key ports. While clients include GBC Winstone, Bathurst Resources, Fulton Hogan, Landcorp, NZ Defence Force, KiwiRail, BP and Shell. Large packaging company, PACT, is among its Australian clients.

And it’s not just about delivering up-to-the-minute environmental balance sheets. Since the Health and Safety At Work Act came into force in April last year, CS-VUE has designed and implemented software to help businesses and organisations better manage and mitigate risks in the workplace.

“Over the past 13 years in software we’ve learnt you can have all the marketing, management and techno speak you want, but what really defines whether you succeed or not is the quality of your software developers and CS-VUE has an exceptional team.

“We work really hard to keep ahead of change and continuously improve. That is how we’ve secured great clients and big projects,” says Wayne Fisher.

| A CS-VUE release  ||  October 10,  2017   |||